Leicester’s Hospitals is celebrating World Hand Hygiene Day today (Friday 5 May) with the launch of new child-friendly promotional materials featuring ‘soaper hero designs’ to raise awareness of the importance of cleaning your hands.

The Infection Prevention Team has worked with partners Deb, a world leader in occupational skin care and hand hygiene, to utilise newly designed literature and branding for the children’s hospital wards and children’s emergency department at Leicester Royal Infirmary.

The new campaign is centred on a short video of a little boy called Sam who finds a pair of special glasses that allow him to see germs. After washing the germs off his hands Sam becomes ‘Soaper Hero’.

 

The video, created by Deb, will be shown on screens in waiting areas in the Children’s Hospital. Deb has also supplied colouring/activity books, stickers and hand cleaning certificates for play therapists to use as educational materials.

The soap dispensers have been rebranded with pink or blue ‘soaper hero’ covers, and all hand sanitiser dispensers have been replaced with an eye catching red design to make sure they stand out.  A full size ‘lift wrap’ to demonstrate the importance of cleaning your hands will also be installed on one of the Balmoral lift doors which travels up to the Children’s Hospital tomorrow.

Liz Collins, lead nurse for infection prevention at Leicester’s Hospitals, said: “We are really grateful to Deb for their support with the branding and funding to kick start this campaign.

“The new designs are so eye-catching and will really appeal to our younger patients. When hand hygiene is taught in primary schools, feedback from parents has shown that their children go home and teach the whole family about germs, so we hope our campaign will have the same effect.”

 

The Infection Prevention team will host activities and raise awareness of the new ‘soap heroes’ branding throughout May, culminating in children’s hospital doctors and nurses dressing up as our very own ‘Soaper Heroes’ to entertain the children and their families at the end of the month.

Liz continues: “This is just the start as we plan to roll this out to other areas of the hospital and are looking to develop bedside workbooks for adult inpatients as it is a really effective way to share this important message.”

You can watch the Soaper Heroes video on Leicester’s Hospitals You Tube channel, and can find more information about hand hygiene at www.leicestershospitals.nhs.uk/patients/patient-welfare/infection-prevention/clean-your-hands/

The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) ‘SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands’ campaign, launched in 2009, is a global call to action to remind health workers how important it is use and promote WHOs five moments of hand hygiene.