NPSA - Multimodal strategy

The campaign utilises several methods to encourage hand hygiene awareness and compliance among staff. This multimodal approach facilitates, educates, prompts and enables healthcare workers to clean their hands at the right time, every time during patient care.

	Hand hygiene at the point of care - alcohol handrub enables staff to quickly and effectively clean their hands at during routine patient care. While we continue to promote the need for handwashing with soap and water when hands are visibly soiled, have come into contact with body fluids; when caring for a patient with vomiting and diarrhoea; or working where there is an outbreak of diarrhoeal disease, e.g. Norovirus or Clostridium difficile. Ensuring the handrubs available at the point of care are critical to increasing the likelihood that staff will clean their hands at the right time, and more often.
	Prompts – powerful posters convey facts about hand hygiene and are strong reminders to staff to clean their hands. Others serve to highlight local champions supporting the campaign or to direct staff to hand cleaning facilities.
	Patient/service user involvement – user friendly materials that raise awareness of the importance of hand hygiene and encourage those being cared for to feel comfortable asking healthcare staff if they have cleaned their hands. The message 'It's OK to Ask', features on posters, leaflets and stickers to reinforce this approach.
	Guidance and resources – implementation guidance, templates, scripts and educational materials such as PowerPoint slides, videos and leaflets, are provided for local campaign coordinators to use to raise awareness, engage and educate staff at all levels.
	Training – the campaign promotes the use of the World Health Organization's (WHO) Five Moments as a simple method that enables staff to understand the important moments to clean their hands when caring for someone in any care setting. We offer training to equip infection control teams with the knowledge and skills needed to train frontline staff in the WHO's Five Moments.

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