5 May
SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands 5 May 2017 : 'Fight antibiotic resistance - it's in your hands'
World Hand Hygiene Day, marked globally on 5 May, highlights the importance of hand hygiene in health care. The slogan of this year’s campaign is “Fight antibiotic resistance … it’s in your hands”, illustrating the important relationship between good infection prevention and control practices like washing your hands and preventing antibiotic resistance.
World Hand Hygiene Day plays an important role in highlighting good infection prevention and control practices to change behaviours to reduce the spread of infections and therefore save the lives of millions. Without behaviour change, antibiotic resistance will remain a major threat.
Through this year’s campaign, the World Health Organization (WHO) is calling on countries and health care facilities to strengthen infection prevention and control programmes based on WHO guidelines on core components of infection prevention and control programmes. A key component of which is adequate hand hygiene, which plays a critical role in combating antimicrobial resistance.
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