SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands

SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands

5 May 2016

University of Geneva Hospitals/Professor Didier Pittet
© Credits

Improving hand hygiene practices in all surgical services through the continuum of care, from surgical wards to operating theatres, to outpatient surgical services, is the primary focus of this year’s 5 May campaign.
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Campaign materials

Hand hygiene self-assessment framework survey report

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Infographic: Hand hygiene and the surgical patient journey

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An infographic image featuring messages on surgical site infections and their prevention.

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Posters

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The 5 May 2016 promotional poster:

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A poster to promote infection prevention and surgical teams working together on hand hygiene – this year’s photo opportunity!

A new educational poster – ‘My 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene Focus on caring for a patient with a post-operative wound’.

Use these other existing educational posters to integrate hand hygiene into clinical practices: central venous catheter, peripheral venous catheter, endotracheal tube and urinary catheter. (links to be inserted as not multimedia)

 

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Surgical handrubbing:

Promotion Boards

A #safesurgicalhands promotional board to use for your photo opportunity – you can download and print or save to a tablet device.

Social media

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An avatar to use on your social media accounts. Use them as your your profile pictures (or overlay the image on top of your profile picture) to show your support for 5 May.

Videos

A video message from WHO to be used at your 5 May events and focused on this year’s theme.

See also the WHO surgical hand preparation technique video and watch how to do a hand sanitizing relay. These videos were done by the WHO Collaborating Centre at the Geneva University Hospital.

A promotional #SafeSurgicalHands video. 

Every year, 313 million people around the world undergo surgery. Every step of the surgical process presents the potential for patients to be exposed to life-threatening infections. Improving hand hygiene practices in all surgical services through the continuum of care, from admission to discharge, is the focus of Hand Hygiene Day 2016.

Additional information

If you feature this link on your own web pages WHO will acknowledge your work by providing a link to your web pages. On social media (primarily Twitter), Professor Didier Pitter (@didierpittet) and Claire Kilpatrick (@claireekt) look forward to engaging with many people who will be supporting 5 May through messaging and posting of photographs.

Preventing infections and reducing an avoidable burden on health systems is still critical around the world today and is part of making sure every health-care setting is safe for treating every single patient. Surgical patients are at risk of health care-associated infections (HAI), in particular surgical site infections (SSI) and device-associated infections (e.g. catheter-associated urinary tract infection). SSIs are a burden on every health-care facility as featured in this WHO report from 2011.

The first Global guideline on surgical site infection prevention will be issued by WHO later in 2016. This work fits neatly with and builds upon the goals of two previous WHO global patient safety challenges, Clean Care is Safer Care and Safe Surgery Save Lives.

An on-going focus on hand hygiene improvement in all areas

Hand hygiene in health care at the right time saves lives. The WHO Hand Hygiene Improvement Toolkit is available to support anyone, in any setting, to participate in this global movement.

Considering the priority of hand hygiene improvement in a broader context, 5 May 2016 also aims to support the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) agenda, given that 35% of health-care facilities still do not have soap and water for hand hygiene, among other things. Find out more here. 

WHO works with many key stakeholders to make the campaign successful every 5 May. This includes the WHO Collaborating Centre at the University Hospitals, Geneva (which Professor Didier Pittet leads), many national organizations, ministries of health, infection prevention societies and Private Organisations for Patient Safety (POPS). Thank you in advance for your support.

Newsletter

A monthly newsletter providing you with updates and advocacy wording you can disseminate in your area.

SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands newsletter

 

 

Web sites promoting WHO SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands

WHO acknowledges those who make every effort to support 5 May activities. Below are links to websites that feature and promote 5 May information and names of those promoting on their Social Media accounts. Many others disseminate messages via emails and newsletters - thank you for making this annual campaign truly global!

Web sites promoting WHO SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands (this link is still to a WebIT page, but not sure we have migrated yet).