Hand hygiene: back to the basics of infection control

During COVID 19 Pandemic hand hygiene is considered as the most important method to prevent its spread from one person to another at the same time it is simple and cost effective. Guidelines for hand hygiene practices have been issued by World Health Organization (WHO) and Centres for disease control and prevention (CDC), Adherence to standard guidelines could be determined by level of awareness, threat perceptions individual’s attitude, availability of resources, workload, and work culture. There is now undisputed evidence that strict adherence to hand hygiene reduces the risk of cross-transmission of infections. With “Clean Care is Safer Care” as a prime agenda of the global initiative of WHO on patient safety programs, it is time for developing countries to formulate the much-needed policies for implementation of basic infection prevention practices in health care set-ups This articles focuses on one of the simplest, low cost but least accepted from infection prevention: hand hygiene. This review also identified some compliance and key areas where more research is needed.