The World Health Organization (WHO) has been actively promoting their Clean Care Is Safer Care program for 10 years. On May 5, WHO is asking for support of their Save Lives: Clean Your Hands program. Benefits of doing so include:
- Hand hygiene at the right times saves lives.
- Hand hygiene in healthcare has saved millions of lives in the last years.
- Hand hygiene is a quality indicator of safe healthcare systems.
- Healthcare problems, like HAIs which are often invisible but nevertheless still occur, are political and social challenges that we must address now.
- Infections can be stopped through good hand hygiene, and patient and health worker harm prevented for less than $10.
- Affordable life-saving technology is available. Alcohol-based hand sanitizers can prevent HAI and millions of deaths every year.
- #handhygiene exists in the media, which means it exists as an important topic, whether due to HAI or outbreaks of deadly diseases like Ebola.
- Embedding specific moments for hand hygiene action into health worker workflow makes it easier to do the right thing every minute, every hour, every day.
- Infection prevention is at the heart of strengthening healthcare systems. Hand hygiene is core to all interventions, whether inserting an invasive device, managing a surgical wound, or giving an injection.
- The social epidemic has already begun to spread with SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands, a successful global campaign promoting hand hygiene action at the point of patient care.