Does campaigning work to prevent infections? A blog for World Hand Hygiene Day 2025

Summary

Can you think of a campaign that has really got your attention, stuck with you and made you do something differently?

Claire Kilpatrick has been involved in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) World Hand Hygiene Day campaign since its launch 17 years ago. In this blog, Claire gives her thoughts around campaigning, explains this year's World Hand Hygiene Day slogan, 'it might be gloves, it’s always hand hygiene', and shares some of WHO's campaign resources.

Content

All the outreach activities for a successful campaign take time and effort, and often considerable resources. But if it works, it can work for a long time!

Do you know what campaign activities actually expect to achieve? How do you evaluate the reach and impact of any of your campaign efforts?

Campaigning can ultimately help make up people’s minds with regards to what they think, how they will act and how they will continue to sell the message in the long term. Ideas exist about how you can undertake annual campaign evaluations. And even if your campaign impact expectations are not met, it doesn't mean your campaigning efforts aren’t worth it. You might still persuade people to change, in some way, at some point. You don't always dash out and buy those new running shoes immediately after you see the ad, but you might in a couple of month’s time because you remembered them…

But, if people feel bombarded with information it makes it harder for them to become informed. This makes succinct campaign messaging and clarity even more important, in order to achieve the desired impact.

For 17 years, since its launch, I have been involved in WHO's World Hand Hygiene Day campaign, commemorated every 5 May. Working with communications experts and colleagues in regions and countries around the world, I have learned so much about the importance of messaging and was inspired to come up with this year’s slogan: it might be gloves, it’s always hand hygiene.

Why this theme? Because:

• Medical gloves used in healthcare—disposable gloves used during medical procedures—can get contaminated as easily as bare hands and do not protect 100%. When worn, gloves should be removed, for example, after touching a wound site/non-intact skin, and hand hygiene performed immediately. But not everyone knows or practices this.
• Regardless of whether gloves are worn, hand hygiene—at the right times and in the right way—is still one of the most important measures to protect patients and health workers. By 2026, hand hygiene compliance monitoring and feedback should be established as a key national indicator, at the very least in all reference hospitals. Currently 68% of countries report they are doing this. Do all countries know this is a mandate to be achieved?
• Excessive glove use contributes significantly to the volume of healthcare waste and does not necessarily reduce transmission of germs. An average university hospital generates 1,634 tons of healthcare waste each year and this number is increasing 2 –3% per year (especially since Covid-19); wealthier countries generate more waste. Appropriate glove use and hand hygiene can help minimise this waste. Some country efforts are evident in this regard, but more needs to be done.

And there are more facts available that you can use to explain these topics to your colleagues.

The great news is, WHO provides a range of resources to help meet the World Hand Hygiene Day campaign goal—to bring people together and to maintain the profile of life saving infection prevention action. By providing these, WHO helps to cut down on the time, effort and materials that countries and healthcare facilities have to find to maintain their own campaign efforts. 

Essentially the campaign is nothing without local action, without you.

So, for 5 May 2025, and for long term impact, here are some of things you could do:

• A campaign badge Use it in your email signature, in your socials, or you can even print it and make real badges/pins – show that you are always part of the campaign community.
   
• An advocacy slide Drop it in to your presentations.
   
• Posters Your own ready to use poster maker. Place these in your work areas. Aim to reach different target audiences. Personalise the posters and remember to change them over time to continue to get attention.
   
• Two-minute educational video Embed this new short video into your training sessions. In this eye-opening short story, follow two nurses—one who always practices hand hygiene at the right moments and another who relies on gloves. Spoiler: Gloves aren’t the hero here.
   
• Video background Use this as your backdrop for virtual meetings to maintain the campaign profile.
   
• Social media messages Use the WHO FAQs to create messages. Repost WHO’s social media messages around 5 May. Remember to use #handhygiene so we can have a socials takeover and have maximum reach.
   
• Idea for an engagement activity Start discussions in an informal way, for example, in wards or clinics when you visit, or advertise more formal sessions, maybe including treats! Use the WHO FAQs and then ensure that conversations are informed by actual staff experiences of glove use and hand hygiene. Consider how you will share copies of FAQs for ongoing reference.
   
• Improvement documents and tools To show impact over time, use the Hand Hygiene Self Assessment Framework alongside other infection prevention assessment tools. The results guide you to available improvement tools. One of the most popular resources on the WHO YouTube channel remains the 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene training video. Some of the most visited WHO web pages remain the how to handrub, how to handwash and 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene posters. 
   
• Implementation is also key A guide to implementation for hand hygiene explains the necessary on-going commitment. WHO has a number of guides to implementation for different infection prevention topics, and I have just co-led on a new guide for implementing an infection prevention national action plan – to be launched by WHO in June.
   
• Global IPC community of practice Chat with people from around the globe to share and learn more on IPC.

As the world of global health evolves, we will need to get even more creative, in both what we say and how we disseminate our messages. Partnerships might help this going forward. In a 2021 paper by Storr et al, they highlighted some considerations for the future around environmental cleaning and infection prevention, including combining advocacy efforts. They noted that “the current melee of global campaigns that countries are called on to be involved in may be resulting in competition and dilution of messages, rather than being complementary.”

There is still a lot of buzz around hand hygiene, but I am grateful to be issuing this blog with Patient Safety Learning because the campaign is more than just hand hygiene and to continue to get attention we can do more together.

But now that it’s 5 May, as my colleagues in the Global Handwashing Partnership say – all the best for clean hands!

Further reading on the hub:

• Top picks: Nine resources about hand hygiene

About the Author

Claire Kilpatrick is a graduate of the University of Glasgow with a PGDiploma in infection prevention and control (IPC) and MSc in medical sciences (travel medicine). She was awarded a doctor of science (DSc) in IPC, WASH and patient and health worker safety from Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) and is a member of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons (Glasgow). 

She is Director at S3 Global Health and has vast experience consulting with WHO and a range of other international and national agencies, NGOs and academia. She focuses primarily on implementation and improvement in healthcare, has experience in global guideline and report writing and, importantly, many years of leading on a global campaign. Past awards include best visual identity in healthcare (Europe) for the WHO hand hygiene global campaign, an innovation award on understanding prevailing hand hygiene in healthcare language, and paper of the year in the Journal of Research in Nursing.