Handwashing Steps: How Many Steps to Good Hand Washing?

My Five Moments for Hand Hygiene

The World Health Organization (WHO) has included an easy strategy for hand hygiene improvement in the WHO Guidelines on Hand Hygiene in Health Care (Advanced Draft). My 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene defines key moments when health care workers ought to be engaging in hand hygiene.


Image courtesy of WHO:
http://www.who.int/gpsc/5may/5Moments_Image.gif

Using this model, health care workers are reminded to clean their hands at the following times:

  1. Before touching a patient
  2. Before clean/aseptic procedures
  3. After body fluid exposure or risk
  4. After touching a patient
  5. After touching patient surroundings

Though the instruction may seem like a review of basic principles, it helps overcome misleading language and complicated descriptions. Easy to learn, logical, and widely applicable, My 5 Moments serves as a reminder of one of the most important things any health care worker can do to protect themselves and others from infection: practice proper hand hygiene.

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