World Hand Hygiene Day 5 May 2026 - Action Saves Lives
Each year the World Health Organization (WHO) SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands campaign aims to progress the goal of maintaining a global profile spotlighting the importance of hand hygiene in health and care and to ‘bring people together’ in support of hand hygiene improvement globally. The core message of SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands is that all health and care workers should clean their hands at the right time and in the right way.
SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands incorporates a global annual World Hand Hygiene day on 5 May to focus on the importance of improving hand hygiene in health care with WHO providing supporting resources for these efforts.
In this, the 18th year of World Hand Hygiene Day, WHO calls on all those providing and supporting health care to refresh their action on hand hygiene and Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) to ensure patient and health care staff safety.
The aims are to:
- Promote hand hygiene best practice - using the right technique for hand washing and hand rubbing, as shown in the National Infection Prevention and Control Manual (NIPCM) in accordance with the WHO 5 Moments within health and care settings, and the WHO 4 Moments in care homes.
- Promote hand hygiene inclusion – refresh all IPC action plans and consider including hand hygiene at the appropriate steps in standard operating procedures (SOPs).
- Raise awareness of hand hygiene compliance monitoring and feedback - this is one of the WHO global action plan and monitoring framework indicators for IPC.
Call to action
Make sure that your organisation is taking part in this day and register with the WHO Sign up for SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands campaign'.
WHO Resources
Download and use the campaign materials and messaging on the WHO Hand Hygiene Day 2026 webpage. These include posters, email signature graphics, Teams backgrounds, PowerPoint templates and social media graphics.
NHS Scotland resources
Read Chapter 1 of the NIPCM or Chapter 1 of the Care Homes IPCM and find out how, when and what product to use for hand hygiene.
Hand hygiene technique
Use the step-by-step hand technique posters to make sure hand hygiene is performed correctly.
- Appendix 1 - How to hand wash (step by step images)
- Appendix 2 - How to hand rub (step by step images)
Health and care workers should follow the moments of hand hygiene to stop infection spreading when providing care.
Read the hand hygiene literature reviews to learn more about the evidence that informs hand hygiene recommendations in the NIPCM.
Hand hygiene compliance monitoring
- National Monitoring Framework to Support Safe and Clean Care Audit Programmes - An organisational approach to prevention of infection auditing
- Standard Infection Control Precautions (SICPs) and Transmission Based Precautions (TBPs) Compliance and quality improvement data collection tool
NHS Educational resources
The Scottish Infection Prevention and Control Education Pathway (SIPCEP) foundation layer covers the 10 standard infection control precautions and other introductory infection control topics. These include:
- Hand hygiene
- Once for Scotland: why infection prevention and control matters are part of a suite of eLearning modules which are part of the nationally agreed ‘Once for Scotland’ statutory training programme.