Hand Hygiene Awareness Day 5 May 2016

See Your Hands – Hand Hygiene Supports Safe Surgical Care

Hand Hygiene is the single most important measure to prevent infections.  In 2005 Hong Kong has pledged support to the World Health Organization (WHO)’s first Global Patient Safety Challenge: Clean Care is Saver Care, by actively promoting hand hygiene in both health-care setting and in the community.  From 2010 onwards, Hand Hygiene Awareness Day is marked annually on 5 May in Hong Kong, in support of the WHO’s SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands initiative which aims to raise the public awareness of good hand hygiene.

Surgical patients are at risk of health care-associated infections (HAI), in particular surgical site infections (SSI) and device-associated infections (e.g. catheter-associated urinary tract infection). SSIs are a burden on every health-care facility. Therefore WHO announced this year’s theme as: See Your Hands – Hand Hygiene Supports Safe Surgical Care. To orchestrate with WHO, the Centre for Health Protection (CHP) has developed a series of promotional materials, served as reminder of the five moments for hand hygiene and seven steps for handrubbing, helping to sustain hand hygiene practice among healthcare workers. In addition, this year the CHP has further expanded the target audiences to general public with particular attention to students, aiming to build up hand hygiene awareness since young.