I would like to flag a new publication in Journal of Hospital Infection.
CITATION: World Hand Hygiene Day 2026 – Action Saves Lives: integrating hand hygiene into action plans to meet a global target
C. Kilpatrick & M Deeves. Journal of Hospital Infection
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195670126000691
The commentary starts: 'Each year since 2009, the World Health Organization's (WHO) SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands campaign has aimed to progress the goal of maintaining a global profile on the importance of hand hygiene and infection prevention and control (IPC) in health care, and to ‘bring people together’ in support of improvement globally. The 2026 SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands campaign day, held on 5 May, coincides with the need for countries to progress implementation of the global action plan and monitoring framework (GAPMF) on IPC [https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/integrated-health-services-(ihs)/ipc/ipc-global-action-plan/who_gampf_w_annexes.pdf?sfvrsn=aef723f7_3], launched in 2024, which is supported by a practical guide to implementation [https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Development%20and%20impl...
I was interested to see the global action plan (2024-2030). Two key actions are especially relevant to HIFA:
'Develop and establish a national curriculum on IPC (or adopt an international one) for pregraduate training and education for all relevant health care disciplines (in, for example, medical, nursing and midwifery schools)'
and
'Mandate that all health and care workers, in particular frontline clinical, cleaning and management staff, receive education and training in standard operating procedures for IPC upon employment and regularly (for instance, annually) thereafter'
I note the action plan appears to relate to facility-based care. Is there a parallel document on IPC in the home and community, looking for example at actions neded to improve hand hygiene across the general public and community health workers?
Best wishes, Neil
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org