Three billion people – 40 per cent of the world’s population – do not have a place in their homes to wash their hands with water and soap. Three quarters of those who lack access to water and soap live in the world’s poorest countries and are amongst the most vulnerable: children and familie...s living in informal settlements, migrant and refugee camps, or in areas of active conflict. This puts an estimated 1 billion people at immediate risk of COVID-19 simply because they lack basic handwashing facilities.
The Hand Hygiene for All initiative aims to move the world towards this goal: supporting the most vulnerable communities with the means to protect their health and environment. It brings together international partners, national governments, public and private sectors, and civil society to ensure affordable products and services are available, especially in disadvantaged areas, and to enable a culture of hygiene.
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Your 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene
Fact sheet
Good hygiene is critical to ensure that healthcare staff provide quality care, reduce the spread of infections, and protect the health of communities. This fact sheet explores the healthcare-related risks of poor hygiene and the critical elements of hand hygiene needed to improve qua...lity of care and reduce negative outcomes of poor compliance (e.g., healthcare-associated infections and antimicrobial resistance) in healthcare facilities, and provides recommendations and additional readings for improving hygiene in health settings and achieving a safe, clean healthcare environment.
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Best practice for hand hygiene requires the availability of clean water, soap, and single use disposable towels or alcohol based hand sanitiser with a concentration of 70%. Availability of these resources is not always assured. When resources for hand hygiene are not available other materials need t...o be considered to prevent transmission of infection. This document provides community guidance on evidence-based alternative hand hygiene strategies in the absence of clean running water, soap or alcohol-based hand rub.
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This report is the first of its kind. It brings together various data sets to present the current status of hand hygiene, highlight lagging progress, and call governments and supporting agencies to action, offering numerous inspiring examples of change.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, hand hygiene ...received unprecedented attention and became a central pillar in national COVID prevention strategies. However, concern with hand hygiene should not only be as temporary public health measure in times of crisis, but as a vital everyday behaviour that contributes to health and economic resilience. Hand hygiene is a highly cost-effective investment, providing outsized health benefits for relatively little cost.
Despite efforts to promote hand hygiene, the rates of access to hand hygiene facilities remain stubbornly low. If current rates of progress continue, by the end of the SDG era in 2030, 1.9 billion people will still lack facilities to wash their hands at home.
This report presents a compelling case for investment in five key ‘accelerators’ as a pathway towards achieving hand hygiene for all – governance, financing, capacity development, data and information, and innovation. These accelerators are identified under the UN-Water SDG 6 Global Acceleration Framework.
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A critical building block to achieving the global goal of universal hand hygiene by 2030 is adequate levels of funding. Understanding the costs of implementing hand hygiene plans is an essential precursor to fund allocation. This tool aims to provide country-specific cost estimates of achieving univ...ersal hand hygiene in households by 2030. It has been developed jointly by WHO and UNICEF, through a consultancy with WASHeconomics, and with input from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the World Bank and WaterAid
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All health-care workers require clear and comprehensive training and education on the importance of hand hygiene, the "My 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene" approach and the correct procedures for handrubbing and handwashing. The following tools and resources are meant to support bridging the knowledge gap... and for you to adopt and adapt to support local improvement.
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This document provides a summary of the recommendations for hand hygiene best practices to be performed by health workers providing care and/or support to patients with filovirus infection (Ebola and Marburg viruses).
Recommendations of the Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee and the HICPAC/SHEA/APIC/IDSA Hand Hygiene Task Force
First Global Patient Safety Challenge Clean Care is Safer Care
The WHO Guidelines on Hand Hygiene in Health Care provide health-care workers (HCWs), hospital administrators and health authorities with a thorough review of evidence on hand hygiene in health care and specific recommendations to impro...ve practices and reduce transmission of pathogenic microorganisms to patients and HCWs. The present Guidelines are intended to be implemented in any situation in which health care is delivered either to a patient or to a specific group in a population. Therefore, this concept applies to all settings where health care is permanently or occasionally performed, such as home care by birth attendants.
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A guide to help you create an Action Plan specific for your health-care facility
The WHO and UNICEF-led Hand Hygiene for All Initiative aims at ensuring implementation for WHO's global recommendations on hand hygiene to prevent and control COVID-19 pandemic, and hand hygiene improvement sustainability in countries as a mainstay of wider infection prevention and control (IPC) and... water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) efforts.
But how can hand hygiene implementation be successful? By implementing strategies and approaches proven through the successes of the WHO Save Lives: Clean Your Hands campaign and fostering integration between hand hygiene and WASH improvements. This brief draws on learning from legacy work and the current evidence based and summarizes how joint action and collaboration are essential for successful strategies, in the context of the COVID-19 response and beyond
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Most health care-associated infections are preventable through good hand hygiene – cleaning hands at the right times and in the right way. The WHO Guidelines on hand hygiene in health care support hand hygiene promotion and improvement in health care facilities worldwide and are complemented by th...e WHO multimodal hand hygiene improvement strategy, the guide to implementation, and implementation toolkit, which contain many ready-to-use practical tools. This module has been prepared to help summarize the WHO guidelines on hand hygiene, associated tools and ideas for effective implementation.
Available in different languages!
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Want to build a tippy tap? Want to teach someone else how to? Here is a graphical manual that works for both literate and illiterate populations. If you need a particular language that’s not here or can assist with translation, please go to the website http://www.tippytap.org/build-a-tippy-tap-...manual
Axxessed 18 December 2014
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Want to build a tippy tap? Want to teach someone else how to? Here is a graphical manual that works for both literate and illiterate populations. Spanish version
Accessed 13 January 2015