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.
5 May 2016 focused on;
Hand hygiene as part of an infection prevention and control programme in all settings that support surgery, prevents patient infection and reduces an avoidable burden on health systems.
Improving hand hygiene practices in all surgical services through the continuum of care, from surgical wards to operating theatres, to outpatient surgical services, is the primary focus of this year’s 5 May campaign.
The My 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene approach defines the key moments when health-care workers should perform hand hygiene.
This evidence-based, field-tested, user-centred approach is designed to be easy to learn, logical and applicable in a wide range of settings.
This approach recommends health-care workers to clean their hands
- before touching a patient,
- before clean/aseptic procedures,
- after body fluid exposure/risk,
- after touching a patient, and
- after touching patient surroundings.