HAI Celebrates Hand Hygiene Day

HAI Celebrates "Hand Hygiene Day"
5^th May 2018

Aligning itself with the World Health Organization’s World Hand Hygiene Day, Hotel Association of India launched the first HAI Hand Hygiene Day on May 05, 2014 with a vision to create awareness about the importance of washing of hands as an effective way of promoting community health and wellbeing.

Over the years, HAI members have developed and implemented a Hand Hygiene Day Program on a voluntary basis. The program highlights the critical role of the simple act of washing hands with soap and water or using a hand sanitizer in the prevention of respiratory illnesses, common cold, influenza and other infections in an easy and cost-effective manner.

The important pillars of the program are Associates’ Engagement, Involving and Incentivizing Local Community, Guest Interactions and Vendor Participation

The program includes activities that are organized within the hotel premises as well as outside of it. In house activities include among others, screening of short films on the importance of hand hygiene in the employee cafeterias, Displaying posters promoting hand hygiene in all departments of the hotel, Organizing poster making or slogan writing competitions, conducting spot quizzes among employees to highlight the key message, displaying a Room Screen alert for the Guests highlighting the importance of hand hygiene, etc

Hotels come up with different and creative themes each year like “Make some bubbles, kill those troubles.” Some hotels have created a “hand wash dance “to show the right and step by step way of washing hands effectively.

Outside of the hotel, employee teams visit nearby schools, clubs, old age homes, NGOs to spread the message. Hotels tie-up with vendors of hand hygiene products like Lifebuoy, Dettol for demonstrations. Vendor products like soaps, sanitizers are combined with other goodies like cookies, chocolates, crayons, stationery, coloring books to craft attractive hampers that are distributed among community members.