Hand Hygiene Day - SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands
Each year on 5 May, the “SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands” campaign takes place as part of a major global effort led by the World Health Organization (WHO) to improve hand hygiene in healthcare settings.
The campaign was launched in 2009 as an extension of the WHO First Global Patient Safety Challenge: “Clean Care is Safer Care”. The focus of the 2016 campaign was on improving hand hygiene practices in all surgical services, from surgical wards to operating theatres, to outpatient surgical services.
To support this campaign, ECDC highlighted its activities in the area of infection control and hospital hygiene training programmes in EU/EEA Member States in a new web page. It included relevant publications, information about evaluated courses on the topic available in those countries, a link to an e-learning tool with chapters addressing this area (Infection Control Wiki), and results of surveys about infection prevention and control capacity and training needs in EU/EEA Member States.
In addition, the ECDC directory of online resources on infection prevention and control was updated with two new pages in connection to training:
- Training courses on infection control and hospital hygiene in the EU/EEA
- Training courses on antimicrobial stewardship in the EU/EEA
Hand hygiene in healthcare has saved millions of lives worldwide in the last years and remains the single most effective way to prevent the spread of microorganisms and to prevent infections. ECDC welcomes WHO’s campaign and supports it every year.
