Primary Health Care | communitymedicine4all

Background Information:

As part of a major global effort to improve hand hygiene in health care, led by WHO to support health-care workers, the SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands annual global campaign was launched in 2009.

Each year the SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands campaign aims to progress the goal of maintaining a global profile on the importance of hand hygiene in health care and to ‘bring people together’ in support of hand hygiene improvement globally.

The central core of SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands is that all health-care workers should clean their hands at the right time and in the right way.

Key Messages:

Together, we can accelerate action to prevent infections and antimicrobial resistance in health care and build a culture of safety and quality in which hand hygiene improvement is given high priority.

Why is sharing knowledge about hand hygiene still so important? Because it helps stop the spread of harmful germs in healthcare.

Health care associated infections (HAIs) are among the most frequent adverse events occurring in the context of health service delivery.

Hand hygiene saves millions of lives every year when performed at the right times in health care. Research from the OECD found that across 34 OECD and EU/EEA countries, investing US$ 1 in improving hand hygiene in health care settings returns about US$ 24.6 in economic returns (i.e. both in health expenditure and productivity gains in the broader economy).