World Health Organization (WHO)  calls on health facilities to prevent health care-associated sepsis through hand hygiene and infection prevention and control (IPC) action. Sepsis is estimated to affect more than 30 million patients every year worldwide. At the Seventieth World Health Assembly in May 2017, Member States adopted a resolution on improving the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of sepsis.

Health care-associated infections, infections acquired during health care delivery, are common and are a risk factor for developing sepsis but we can prevent this. Effective hand hygiene plays a key role. On world hand hygiene day, the focus for everyone should be on prevention of sepsis in health care.