Cleanzine: your weekly cleaning and hygiene industry newsletter 18th April 2024 Issue no. 1110
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Fight antibiotic resistance ... it's in your hands
World Hand Hygiene Day, marked globally on 5th May, highlights the importance of hand hygiene in healthcare.
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 such as washing hands properly 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 Organisation is calling on countries and healthcare 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.
"Healthcare-associated infections are one of the most frequent adverse events in healthcare delivery and are a major public health problem that affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide," says Dr Mahmoud Fikri, WHO regional director for the Eastern Mediterranean.
"One out of every 10 patients gets an infection while receiving care, and up to 32% of patients receiving surgical care get a post-operative infection, of which up to 51% are resistant to treatment with antibiotics. WHO calls on policy-makers to stop antibiotic resistance spread by making infection prevention and hand hygiene a national policy priority.
"WHO also calls on infection prevention and control leaders to implement WHO's core components for infection prevention, including hand hygiene, to combat antibiotic resistance.
"Healthcare-associated infections cause harm and suffering that are easily avoided. They also result in additional financial burden and sometimes even long-term disabilities or death.
"I urge all healthcare workers to ensure adequate hand hygiene and all healthcare facilities to join in the 'Save Lives: Clean Your Hands' campaign and commit to improving hand hygiene practices to help save more lives."
Hospital administrators are expected to lead a year-round infection prevention and control programme to protect their patients from resistant infections. Adequate hand hygiene reduces the risk of healthcare-associated infections and has the potential to save eight million lives every year in hospitals alone. Clean hands make the health system a safer place.
4th May 2017