5th May is World Hand Hygiene Day 2025, and 2025 is the 17th year of celebration since it was launched by the World Health Organisation (WHO).
For World Hand Hygiene Day 2025 there is a heavy focus on best practice with gloves and other PPE for the healthcare sector.
Hand hygiene in healthcare protects clinicians and patients, so it is important to know best practice guidance. Reviewing your workflows can help minimise the healthcare infections associated with cross contamination.
1. When to wash your hands in healthcare
Hand hygiene must be completed at the right moments throughout healthcare treatment. WHO offers ‘Your 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene’:
- Before touching a patient.
- Before clean/aseptic procedures.
- After body fluid exposure risk.
- After touching a patient.
- After touching the patient’s surroundings.
Regular handwashing at these points reduces cross contamination between patients, surroundings, and healthcare professionals and other people in the area.
2. Prepare for safe handwashing
Standard infection control steps, like handwashing, are to be performed by all staff in all care settings, no matter whether infection is known to be present or not. Clinicians must ensure hand hygiene is completed thoroughly at all times.
Some steps that must be followed are:
- Forearms must be exposed, with all cuts or abrasions covered by a waterproof dressing.
- Jewellery should be removed or moved out of the way during hand hygiene.
- Wash hands that are visibly dirty, or when caring for a patient with vomiting or diarrhoeal illness, or a suspected or known gastrointestinal infection.
- In all other circumstances, use an alcohol-based hand rub.
3. Follow best practice steps for hand hygiene
Many governing bodies and sources of guidance have step-by-step instructions for effective hand hygiene. NHS England refers to the steps laid out by the UK Health Security Agency for both hand wash and hand rub.
Each follows the same steps. Healthcare teams should regularly review these to ensure best practice is implemented.
4. You might have gloves on but hand hygiene is still important!
Consistent with the theme of this year’s World Hand Hygiene Day 2025, regardless of whether gloves are worn or not, hand hygiene is still one of the most important ways to protect patients.
Hand hygiene must always be performed before putting on and after removing gloves. Gloves should also be removed and replaced in line with the WHO ‘5 Moments for Hand Hygiene’, highlighted earlier.
However, clinicians should be aware that unnecessary glove use prompts excessive waste. Between February and August 2020, 3 billion items of PPE were discarded, creating 591 tonnes of waste per day.
Clinicians should have appropriate clinical and offensive waste containers to hand to discard these items when necessary.
5. Choose effective hand hygiene solutions
Alcohol-based hand rubs are recommended by WHO because of their fast-acting and broad microbicidal activity, but appropriate alternatives are approved by the NHS, including alcohol-free solutions. Each product can also be used without a sink available, which suits many healthcare practices.
NHS England notes that hand rubs should be available to staff as close to the point of care as possible. Using wall-mounted solutions or portable stands can be ideal. Also consider them in popularly frequented locations, such as an entrance, help desk and waiting areas.
Initial Medical provides a range of hand hygiene solutions, including their Signature Alcohol Hand Sanitiser and an alternative alcohol-free hand sanitiser – UltraProtect™. The UltraProtect™ hand sanitiser kills 99.99% of germs, including Swine Flu, MRSA and Norovirus, and is dermatologically approved to not dry out or crack skin. You can also choose moveable No Touch dispensers that minimise cross contamination at points of care.
Get in touch to learn more about effective hand hygiene with Initial Medical.
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