Support World Hand Hygiene Day

For the 10th year running, World Hand Hygiene Day is a cornerstone of the WHO’s campaign to galvanise action at the point of care. This year’s theme is focused on preventing sepsis, a potentially life-threatening infection.

While the risks of sepsis are real, there are simple steps that can be taken to help avoid infection.

1. Include hand hygiene as part of training - make sure that hand hygiene training is a part of preparing people to work for your organisation.

2. Help people understand how to protect themselves - create a poster that informs your staff of what they need to know to be safe.

3. Demonstrate best practice in your environment - take the opportunity to demonstrate hand hygiene best practice. The WHO reports that one in every 10 patients gets an infection while receiving care in a hospital facility, and up to 32 per cent of patients receiving surgical care get a post-operative infection. Unfortunately, 51 per cent of these cases are resistant to treatment with antibiotics. Practicing good hand hygiene is key to reducing these numbers and, even for experts, reminders are a good idea.

4. Provide quality products - if you want staff onsite to operate as hygienically as possible, then providing quality, available and easily accessible products is the first step. 

5. Track and share your progress - it is important to understand whether your efforts to improve hygiene are working. You can do this by performing audits on a specific area. Simply monitor the number of staff, residents or visitors washing their hands correctly over a given period of time. Then repeat this process and look for improvements. Share the results with your staff to engage them in continuous improvement. 

World Hand Hygiene Day is part of the WHO’s drive to reduce the instance of healthcare associated infections (HAIs). As part of Kimberly-Clark Professional*’s commitment to help you reduce HAIs it is offering a complimentary kit to help you promote hand hygiene. Request your  kit here.