World Hand Hygiene Day
World Hand Hygiene Day is held annually on 5 May. The 'Save Lives: Clean Your Hands' global campaign was launched by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2009.
The Commission supports World Hand Hygiene Day, which aims to maintain global promotion, visibility and sustainability of hand hygiene in health care and to bring people together in support of hand hygiene improvement around the world.
New resources are now available for World Hand Hygiene Day 2024
Overview
On World Hand Hygiene Day the WHO encourages health and aged care workers to build and share their knowledge about hand hygiene and infection prevention and control.
Sharing knowledge about hand hygiene is important because it helps stop the spread of harmful germs in healthcare.
What can you do to support World Hand Hygiene Day
Everyone can contribute by supporting implementation of the National Hand Hygiene Initiative in health and aged care services.
Strengthen learning
Promote innovative ways to encourage learning about hand hygiene:
- Talk about hand hygiene at the point of care
- Model best practice hand hygiene technique
- Include hand hygiene in scenario-based training, feedback during team meetings and talking boards.
Promote access
Build health and aged care worker knowledge and capacity for learning about hand hygiene:
- Promote the hand hygiene and infection prevention and control online learning modules
- Promote the auditor training pathway and the NHHI auditing program
- Offer locally developed face to face training to support your service’s needs.
Raise awareness
Support a safe healthcare environment and reduce the spread of infection:
- Mentor colleagues and model hand hygiene practice
- Promote a strong patient safety culture
- Learn why monitoring hand hygiene compliance matters in your health service organisation.
Encourage measurement and evaluation
Support monitoring of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) to improve patient safety:
- Consider different ways to measure success in preventing HAIs
- Assess the uptake of education
- Monitor hand hygiene product use
- Monitor rates of HAIs.
Strengthen learning
Promote innovative ways to encourage learning about hand hygiene:
- Talk about hand hygiene at the point of care
- Model best practice hand hygiene technique
- Include hand hygiene in scenario-based training, feedback during team meetings and talking boards.
Promote access
Build health and aged care worker knowledge and capacity for learning about hand hygiene:
- Promote the hand hygiene and infection prevention and control online learning modules
- Promote the auditor training pathway and the NHHI auditing program
- Offer locally developed face to face training to support your service’s needs.
Raise awareness
Support a safe healthcare environment and reduce the spread of infection:
- Mentor colleagues and model hand hygiene practice
- Promote a strong patient safety culture
- Learn why monitoring hand hygiene compliance matters in your health service organisation.
Encourage measurement and evaluation
Support monitoring of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) to improve patient safety:
- Consider different ways to measure success in preventing HAIs
- Assess the uptake of education
- Monitor hand hygiene product use
- Monitor rates of HAIs.
Resources to promote hand hygiene
The Commission has produced resources to promote hand hygiene in health care and aged care. New resources have been developed for aged care settings and to promote hand hygiene for medical practitioners.
World Hand Hygiene Day 2024 campaign assets
The Commission has developed campaign materials for use by healthcare services and organisations that are promoting World Hand Hygiene Day on 5 May 2024.
See our Communications Kit with downloadable assets and show your support by downloading and sharing the content on your website, social networks or within your health service.
National hand hygiene audit
Hand hygiene compliance is assessed against a national benchmark of 80%.
The latest interactive report on compliance audit data is now available.
National reporting
There are three national hand hygiene audits conducted each year. National Audit period 2 became voluntary from 1 April 2023 to provide health service organisations with additional capacity for quality improvement activities. For more information, see Advisory AS23/01: Advice on national hand hygiene audit period 2.
If your organisation submits hand hygiene audit data to the national dataset, you can produce your own local poster report.
Auditing resources
The NHHI home page includes resources to support hand hygiene auditing.
Auditor training resources
Two new resources have been developed to support Region and Organisation Administrators deliver hand hygiene auditor training:
National reporting
There are three national hand hygiene audits conducted each year. National Audit period 2 became voluntary from 1 April 2023 to provide health service organisations with additional capacity for quality improvement activities. For more information, see Advisory AS23/01: Advice on national hand hygiene audit period 2.
If your organisation submits hand hygiene audit data to the national dataset, you can produce your own local poster report.
Auditing resources
The NHHI home page includes resources to support hand hygiene auditing.
Auditor training resources
Two new resources have been developed to support Region and Organisation Administrators deliver hand hygiene auditor training: