The World Health Organisation’s annual world hand hygiene day will this year be held on Tuesday, May 5. The theme of the event is “Hand hygiene is your entrance door” and the aim is to reinforce how clean hands are the most important way to fight the spread of illnesses.
Diversey Care is once again supporting the event and is organising a new global #handsonmyheart photo-art competition on Twitter and Instagram.
“We partner with the WHO on a number of programmes and are delighted to support them again this year to help raise awareness of hand hygiene and the fight against infections,” says Ilham Kadri, President of Diversey Care. “Activities such as the competition engage people in a fun way but help to explain the important message that clean hands save lives.”
Many common infections are most readily spread by personal contact or touching contaminated surfaces which is why hand hygiene is so important. This is reflected in the World Health Organisation’s Five Moments of Hand Hygiene which recommends that healthcare workers wash their hands before patient contact, before an antiseptic task, following the risk of exposure to body fluids, following patient contact and following contact with patients’ surroundings.
As part of its support for this year’s WHO event, Diversey Care is repeating its global “Give Us A Hand To Raise Hand Hygiene Awareness” competition. This year the competition calls for individuals or teams to create photo-artworks and share them on Twitter (@diversey and @diverseycareuki) or Instagram (diverseycare) with the hashtag #handsonmyheart. Entries must show at least one hand in the photograph and include a short description on why those hands are worth protecting. The artworks will be judged on how the stories and creativity celebrate life and touch the judges’ hearts. Three winners will each receive an iPad Air 2 tablet. The competition is free to enter and open until Sunday 31 May 2015.
Last year’s inaugural competition attracted entrants from all over the world who contributed designs to highlight the benefits of hand hygiene. The winners of the three categories were eleven-year-old Lucy Boycott from Cheshire who created a painting while she was a patient at the local Whiston Hospital, The Silesian Rehabilitation Centre in Poland which submitted a series of photographs highlighting teamwork, and St Ives Nursery in Cambridgeshire where the youngsters devised a collage incorporating their own hand prints.
Diversey Care has developed a range of documents, guidelines, posters and related items which, with additional material developed by the WHO such as the Five Moments of Hand Hygiene, can all be accessed and downloaded freely from the company’s website.
