About SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands
What is involved?
As part of the SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands initiative, health-care facilities across the world are urged to refer to the WHO Guidelines on Hand Hygiene in Health Care (right) to improve hand hygiene and thus reduce health care-associated infection.
The SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands initiative reinforces the "My 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene" approach as key to protect the patient, the health-care worker and the health-care environment against harmful germs.
Globally, compliance with the "My 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene" approach averages around 40%1. Put another way, this means that health-care workers fail to clean their hands 60% of the time that they should when caring for patients.
We encourage representatives from all health-care facilities across the world to prepare an action plan to improve hand hygiene now.
To support the development and implementation of action plans to improve hand hygiene, a suite of tools is available on this website, including a Template Action Plan and Self Assessment Framework. These tools offer support regardless of your health-care facility’s starting point. Click on the link below to access these tools.
1 WHO Guidelines on Hand Hygiene in Health Care (2009)
