By Jim Arbogast, Ph.D., Hygiene Sciences and Public Health Advancements Vice President, GOJO Industries

Every year on May 5th, hospitals around the globe join the World Health Organization (WHO) to celebrate World Hand Hygiene Day and raise awareness for the importance of hand hygiene. Public health organizations around the globe join this celebration, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Health Canada.

The WHO launched the “SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands” campaign in 2009 as a major global effort to improve hand hygiene in healthcare. The core of the campaign is that “all healthcare workers should clean their hands at the right time and in the right way.”

This year’s theme – “Seconds save lives – clean your hands!” – focuses on achieving appropriate hand hygiene at the point of care – all leading back to the WHO’s recommended 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene (listed below) and cleaning your hands with good technique using high-quality efficacious products.

• Before touching a patient.
• Before clean/aseptic procedure.
• After body fluid exposure/risk.
• After touching a patient.
• After touching patient surroundings.

Globally, this past year has brought a heightened focus on many public health mitigation measures, including hand hygiene – something that has played an important role in patient care at healthcare facilities for many decades. Now that the public better understands the importance of killing germs that may cause illness and has made handwashing and hand sanitizing part of their daily routine, we hope this healthy habit will stay and become an enduring behavior at key moments for the rest of our lives.

Keeping your hands clean when visiting a healthcare facility

Good hand hygiene is a simple but powerful tool to improve patient safety. And in healthcare, everyone plays a role in patient safety – it is not something just for healthcare workers and staff to practice. Patients/residents and visitors should also practice good hand hygiene when visiting a healthcare facility, particularly:

• When you enter and leave a patient room.
• Before and after touching a patient/resident.
• After using the restroom.

When applying hand sanitizer, remember to use enough to thoroughly wet your hands, rub briskly until dry – and don’t forget your fingertips, thumbs, and in between your fingers. This should take around 15-20 seconds with a well-formulated product like PURELL® Hand Sanitizer.

Supporting global public health

GOJO is one of the founding members of the WHO initiative, Private Organizations for Patient Safety (POPS), which launched on World Hand Hygiene Day in 2012. POPS enables the WHO and private organizations to collaboratively work towards improving hand hygiene education and outcomes.

GOJO has been committed to helping the world safely clean their hands for 75 years and leading the science of formulation and delivery systems engineering to ensure every dose of soap or alcohol-based hand rub delivers a safe, efficacious, and pleasant result.  Thanks to our $400 million capital investments to our production capacity and fulfillment capabilities in the past year, we are in a strong position to support all types of healthcare facilities, schools, vaccination centers, restaurants, grocery stores, stores/online retailers, airports, and other businesses with PURELL® products.