Let's celebrate 5 May 2013!

This year, once again, 5 May is a great success, with increased registrations for SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands, new countries joining and new Member States pledging to combat health care-associated infection and launching national hand hygiene campaigns. Many stakeholders have helped WHO achieve this success and are to be commended: WHO regional and country offices and collaborating centers, ministries of health, centers for disease control and prevention, societies, networks, academic institutions, patient associations, and the Private Organizations for Patient Safety network. This global reach and commitment is truly unique and makes us confident we can make patients safer while receiving health care, including through their own active participation in achieving this.

Celebrations for 5 May 2013 aim to be as inclusive of everyone as possible! This time, the day actually falls on a Sunday, a rest day for most, but not for all. Activities in support of 5 May have always been promoted as 'on or around 5 May' to ensure all health-care workers have the opportunity to take part in important hand hygiene awareness-raising activities. Therefore, we encourage those working on Saturday and Sunday, to celebrate hand hygiene promotion and improvement on 4 and 5 May 2013. Celebrations in other parts of the world where these are not regular working days will take place on 6 and 7 May 2013.

Our call to action for you in 2013 is two-fold:

Continue to focus on hand hygiene monitoring and feedback!
Evaluation and repeated monitoring of a range of indicators reflecting hand hygiene infrastructures and practices, as well as health-care workers’ and senior managers’ knowledge and perception of the problem of health care-associated infection and the importance of hand hygiene at the health-care facility, is a vital component of any successful hand hygiene campaign.

Visit our new page on monitoring and feedback

Patients have a voice too!
Patient participation is a powerful approach to achieving improvements in health care by building and strengthening a strong patient safety climate. Identify the best way to gather patient participation in hand hygiene promotion and improvement, according to your local culture and facility’s approach.

Take a look at the new page dedicated to this topic.

Registering for SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands

You can still register now and be part of this global movement to improve hand hygiene! Heading to 5 May 2013, we aim to gather new health-care settings joining especially from countries that have LOW or NO registrations. See the list of these countries below. Please help us achieve new registrations from at least 5 new countries!
If you have already registered, there is no need to register again.

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