SureWash is once again proud to support the annual World Health Organization (WHO) global hand hygiene campaign. Each year the WHO SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands campaign aims to maintain a global profile on the importance of hand hygiene in healthcare and to ‘bring people together’ in support of hand hygiene improvement globally.
5th May 2021 objectives
This year’s 5th May slogan is Seconds Save Lives – Clean Your Hands. The WHO is calling on healthcare facilities to achieve effective hand hygiene action at the point of care.
The overall objectives are to:
- Engage multiple audiences highlighting their role in achieving effective hand hygiene action at the point of care. This is in relation to the WHO multimodal hand hygiene improvement strategy.
- To support implementation of the WHO 2020 recommendations for universal hand hygiene in health care facilities and of the WHO/UNICEF Hand Hygiene for All initiative.
The aim of the SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands campaign is that all healthcare workers should clean their hands at the right time and in the right way. Therefore, hand hygiene should be performed at the recommended 5 moments at the point of care;
- Before touching a patient
- Before clean/aseptic procedures
- After body fluid exposure/risk
- After touching a patient
- After touching patient surroundings.
Hand hygiene products such as alcohol-based hand rub, soap, water should also be available and easily accessible to support this. In addition, the correct handwashing and hand-rubbing technique should be performed.
Cecil Ryan, Executive Chairman, SureWash states: “Performing hand hygiene correctly at the correct moments is critical to patient safety. To achieve compliance, quality training and education must be delivered. This means making objective training and retraining accessible to all 24/7 to build muscle memory. We need to build a habit to make hand hygiene second nature. Therefore, the 5th May 2021 slogan is really powerful as it takes only a few seconds to clean your hands correctly. If you are going to do it, do it right.”
Calls to action:
Health care workers: Now more than ever – clean your hands at the point of care!
IPC practitioners: Be a champion and mentor for clean hands at the point of care.
Facility Managers: Ensure hand hygiene supplies are available at every point of care.
Policy Makers: Invest now to ensure hand hygiene for all.
Patients and families: Help us to help you: please clean your hands.
Vaccinators: Clean your hands with every vaccine.
Everyone: Make clean hands your habit – it protects us all!
How to get involved
There are lots of creative ways you can get involved. Help us build excitement and momentum around the day to improve hand hygiene at the point of care.
In particular, you can:
- Attend the WHO high-level global event with country and key partner organization leaders on 5th May 2021 at 1 pm CET: https://echo.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_EXKCrEErSPKPvZXKia7Uaw
- Attend the technical webinar on hand hygiene on 5th May from 3-4 pm CET: https://webbertraining.com/schedulep1.php
- Participate in the “Faces of the Campaign” initiative: https://5may.cleanhandssavelives.org/
If your facility would like to sign up for the SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands 5th May hand hygiene campaign, register below. If you have already registered and would like to access campaign materials such as posters, web banners, animations etc. click here.
In addition, make sure to get involved on social media. Join the conversation by using the hashtags #HandHygiene #CleanYourHands #InfectionPrevention.
If you are a SureWash customer and would like support celebrating the 5th May 2021 hand hygiene campaign, please get in contact below. There is no better day to use your SureWash devices to promote hand hygiene within your facility.
Send us a message and we will get back to your shortly.
