cleanyourhands campaign (England and Wales)
Also: Cleanyourhands
National Patient Safety Agency campaign rolled out to acute hospitals in England and Wales from December 2004: alcohol hand rub at every bedside, posters and materials promoting hand hygiene, regular hand hygiene audits, and patient empowerment ("it's OK to ask"). It ran alongside a high-profile political drive against MRSA and C. difficile.
- Years
- 2004–2010
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Topic
- Hand hygieneInfectious disease
- Asks people to
- Start
- Strategy
- Policy pairedSimple instruction
- Channel
- Clinical settingPrint
- Audience
- CliniciansStaff in 187 acute NHS trusts; patients were encouraged to remind staff.
Evidence
Quasi-experimentalPositive
Interrupted time series, 187 acute trusts, July 2004-June 2008 (Stone 2012): soap plus alcohol rub procurement tripled (21.8 to 59.8 mL per bed day); MRSA bacteraemia fell from 1.88 to 0.91 and C. difficile from 16.75 to 9.49 per 10,000 bed days. More soap was independently associated with less C. difficile, and more alcohol rub with less MRSA in the last year. The Health Act 2006 and Department of Health improvement-team visits were also associated with falls, so the campaign is one of several concurrent causes.
Sponsor (who paid)
- National Patient Safety Agency (NHS England and Wales) Foreign government, creator
Credits (who made it)
Not recorded yet.
Related campaigns
- SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands 2009–now
Sources
- Stone SP, Fuller C, Savage J et al. Evaluation of the national Cleanyourhands campaign to reduce Staphylococcus aureus bacteraemia and Clostridium difficile infection in hospitals in England and Wales: four year interrupted time series. BMJ 344:e3005 evaluation · 2012 · DOI 10.1136/bmj.e3005 · PMID 22556101
- Fuller C et al. National observational study to evaluate the 'cleanyourhands' campaign (NOSEC): a questionnaire based study of national implementation. Antimicrob Resist Infect Control 2015 evaluation · 2015 · DOI 10.1186/s13756-015-0077-0 · PMID 26600938
Research notes
Clinician-facing campaign. Discovered 2026-10-22 (clinician-campaigns pass). Rollout date (1 December 2004) and design from the BMJ abstract (PubMed). endYear 2010 is an estimate (the NPSA campaign is generally described as ending around 2010; the NPSA closed in 2012) - not confirmed on a fetched page. Patient-empowerment element ("it's OK to ask") from general knowledge, unverified. Evaluation sources added 2026-10-22 (citation snowballing / helpline pass): Fuller 2015; evidence level and outcome unchanged.
Record cases/uk-cleanyourhands.json, updated 2026-10-22· Link to this campaign