 On May 5th, Saint Lucia commemorated World Hand Hygiene Day under the theme Accelerate Action Together, Save Lives, Clean Your Hands. This year, the focus is on cultivating actions towards good hand hygiene practices that will reduce the risk of infections. Laurentia Melo, a family life educator at the Bureau of Health Education, says the ministry's hand hygiene exercises and programs are targeted at several segments of the population. The objective of those activities is to create public awareness and to promote the recommended hand washing hygiene practices. We will be engaging the schools, the primary schools, children in the lower grades as grades K and grade 1. So we will be teaching them how to wash their hands properly and we will be interacting with them as well as giving them hands-on activities. We have spin the wheel where they will learn what they need to wash their hands, the times they need to wash their hands and so forth. We will also be engaging early childhood development centres. Those persons, the providers, they are models and given that the children are in group setting, the likelihood of infections, job spreading is very high. And so we will engage the providers and as well as equip them with the skills so that they can enforce those basic simple hand washing procedures and as well as enforce it. Meantime, the Millennium Heights Medical Complex, MHMC, hosted a hand hygiene demonstration at the complex in observance of World Hand Hygiene Day. Ruth Rages Addisanya, Senior Manager for Quality at the MHMC says at the institution, hand hygiene as an essential practice is constantly enforced. This she says is extremely important in keeping hospital acquired infections down and away from patients and staff. Today, we utilise all our teams. So with me, I have nursing teams from Oenkei U Hospital, Wellness Facility Turning Point as we go through the facility ensuring that all of the units are exposed to the requirements. Part of the requirements for hand hygiene are reminders. So we have posters, we have information leaflets for staff, we have information leaflets for patients and we just reinforce the practices to raise the awareness and to ensure that we at MHMC follow all the required practices for the institution. Country Program Specialist for Pao, Mr. Ronald Ewitt, talks about his participation in the hand hygiene demonstration. I had the privilege of participating in the process which was very interesting. When I entered the facility, my hands came in contact with my vehicle and nowhere else. So I took the opportunity to test my hands before washing or sanitising and it was confirmed that it's contaminated, it's dirty. I then washed my hands and it was tested again and I followed a simple procedure in washing my hands and then I had it tested in which I noticed that the light did not fluorescent reflecting the presence of bacteria. It confirmed to me that hand hygiene is definitely effective in the prevention of spread of diseases in hospital, at home, at school, at work, wherever you find yourself. The Ministry of Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs continues to provide hand washing hygiene refresher sessions for community health aides island wide. According to the World Health Organization, now is a critical time when countries across the world need to accelerate implementation of lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic and reduce investments to close gaps in infection prevention and control including hand hygiene. From the Communications Unit of the Ministry of Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs, Tulita Peter reporting.