The campaign theme for this year’s World Hand Hygiene Day is, “Promoting knowledge and capacity building of health care workers through innovative and impactful training and education on infection prevention and control, including hand hygiene.” The focus is on training education and taking action! Taking action is key as it is not enough to be trained on hand hygiene but hand hygiene needs to be practiced correctly and consistently for proper Infection prevention and control.
We at the ISID are at the forefront of the prevention and control of Infectious Diseases. We believe hand hygiene is key to preventing infections not only in 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 Healthcare 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.