The campaign theme for this year’s World Hand Hygiene Day is, “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.” While the slogan is: Accelerate action together. SAVE LIVES – Clean Your Hands, the campaign objectives for the World Hand Hygiene Day 2023 are to:

• Strengthen and empower communities of actors in health care to accelerate action to improve hand hygiene and infection prevention and control at point of care.

• Foster collaboration and working together of people and organizations towards the common goal of minimizing the risk of infections and the development of antimicrobial resistance in health care.

We at the ISID are in the forefront of the prevention and control of Infectious Diseases. We believe hand hygiene is key to prevent infections not only in the health care settings but in other settings as well. The speed in the development of antimicrobials is slower compared to the development of antimicrobial resistance. Most of these infections begin in the health care settings and all actors in the health care setting should be involved in promoting hand hygiene to curb the spread of infections.

The ISID resource, the Guide to Infection Control in the Health care setting in its 6th Edition, provides principles and interventions that can reduce the rate of infections and the impact of its associated consequences particularly higher morbidity and mortality, costs related to longer health facility stays and AMR for all the stakeholders involved. The resource has a dedicated chapter on hand hygiene which describes the various approaches that improve health worker hand hygiene compliance.