Fight antibiotic resistance – it’s in your hands to improve antibiotic stewardship

Abstract

The public health threat emanating from the emergence and spread of multidrug-resistant bacteria is well known. Each year the World Health Organization (WHO) SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands campaign promotes a different theme; the call to action in this year’s annual ‘Global Hand Hygiene Day’ on May 7th, 2017, is ‘Fight antibiotic resistance – it’s in your hands’.1 Good hand hygiene is widely acknowledged as the single most important measure to prevent infections in hospital. However, it would be naive to believe that hand hygiene alone will solve the problems posed by multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria (MDR-GNB).