Clean Hospitals Day 2025: Human Factors in Healthcare Environmental Hygiene

Clean Hospitals Day is an annual celebration held on 20 October. It aims to increase awareness of healthcare environmental hygiene (HEH) and to foster facility engagement and appreciation of environmental services staff. This year’s theme, “Human Factors and Collaboration,” highlights the role that both human excellence and human error play in infection prevention and control (IPC) and emphasizes the importance of supporting environmental service (EVS) workers and their management in providing quality care. Although HEH remains a relatively neglected field of IPC, the healthcare environment is now recognized as a major source of pathogen transmission—either directly through fomites and shared medical devices or indirectly as a source of hand contamination.[1-4] Healthcare-associated infections are among the main global challenges in infectious diseases and are also major drivers of antibiotic consumption. Reducing these infections not only saves lives, money, and resources but also decreases antibiotics use, thereby reducing the selective pressure that drives antibiotic resistance.[5-7] Environmental hygiene comprises both technical domains and human factors. The technical domains—surfaces, air control, water control, device reprocessing and sterilization, laundry, and waste management—relate to the various environments in healthcare facilities that must be managed both physically and microbiologically to ensure the safety of patients, staff, visitors, and the broader environment.[8] Human factors concern the people responsible for hygiene and their behaviors, encompassing everything from EVS training and management to team dynamics, career development, internal communication, and safety culture within facilities. Although human factors are often inherently more difficult to improve or even measure than technical indicators, their importance cannot be overstated. This is evident in the World Health Organization (WHO) Multimodal Improvement Strategy (MMIS), the behavior change model most often implemented globally to evaluate both HEH and hand hygiene at the facility level. The WHO MMIS consists of five pillars: system change, training and education, monitoring and feedback, workplace reminders, and institutional safety climate.[9] Of these, only “system change” and “workplace reminders” primarily concern technical components. The other three pillars focus on human factors, as people ultimately determine the quality of an HEH program. A long road lies ahead: globally, EVS workers’ roles in IPC are rarely recognized, and they are often undertrained and underpaid. Outsourcing and restricting cleaning time to reduce costs further impact quality, as do language barriers between EVS and clinical staff.[10] A Clean Hospitals Day promotional toolkit for healthcare facilities has been developed and is freely available: https://cleanhospitals.com/promotional-toolkit-2025/. The toolkit includes several posters [Figure 1], a selfie board, social media tiles, and a frame for profile pictures. Facilities are encouraged to use these materials in their own campaigns to celebrate Clean Hospitals Day around the world.Figure 1: Clean Hospitals Day 2025: Main campaign posterFacilities that wish to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their HEH programs and identify areas for improvement can access the Healthcare Environmental Hygiene Self-Assessment Framework tool, which is available online in 15 languages: https://cleanhospitals.com/hehsaf/. Join us in celebrating Clean Hospitals Day and th e staff who make it possible! AP is the president of Clean Hospitals, and MM is the Education Program Director. BM, PP, and DJW are all board members. This Correspondence was supported by the Institute of Global Health (Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland). The authors alone are responsible for the views expressed in this Correspondence; these do not necessarily represent the views, decisions, or policies of the institutions with which they are affiliated.