National Hand-Washing Awareness Week
As the weather gets colder and people spend more time indoors, it’s more important than ever to be washing your hands! Sickness tends to spread more during the winter months, but it’s mostly because everyone stays indoors to keep warm. This December, make a note to celebrate National Hand-Washing Awareness Week, which takes place December 1st through 7th. You use your hands to do everything, so keeping them clean reduces the transfer of germs and keeps hygiene to a max!
When to Wash Your Hands
The most important times to wash your hands are whenever your hands will be coming close to your face, as well as anytime you’re leaving a germ-filled area. Before eating is essential, especially if you’ll be eating food with your hands. Additionally, before applying makeup, putting in contacts, and other daily routine facets should be accompanied by hand-washing. As for leaving germ-filled areas, bathrooms come to mind first for most of us. However, there are plenty of common spaces with a surprising amount of germs. Make sure to wash your hands after visiting an ATM, the grocery store, the gym, or any area with many people. With so many people sick during winter, it’s also important to wash your hands before and after visiting or caring for someone who is ill. If you are facing a case of the sniffles, wash your hands after blowing your nose, coughing, and sneezing. And if you’re not sure that a situation you’re in requires hand-washing, it’s best to wash your hands real quick anyway. There’s never any harm in keeping clean!
Rules to Being Sick
One of the best ways to prevent the spread of germs between hands is to keep germs from touching hands in the first place! Don’t cough or sneeze into your hands, instead opting to use the crevice of your elbow. Even if you’re not sick, germs may still exist in your coughs and sneezes, and you should make an effort to keep them away from other people. Agility Health also recommends avoiding putting your fingers in your eyes, nose, or mouth as much as you can. Try not to play with your face asbent-mindedly, and make a conscious effort to keep germs far from any orifices.
Steps for Washing Hands
Sure, we all know how to wash our hands, but are you doing it properly? Follow the steps below to most effectively fight off germs
Step One: Wet
Step One is to wet your hands with clean, running water. The temperature of the water does not matter as much as you’d believe, and warm or cold water is fine! Apply soap once your hands are sufficiently wet.
Step Two: Lather
Lather your hands! Lathering is simply rubbing your hands together with soap in between in order to spread the soap. Commonly forgotten spots are the back of the hands, between fingers, under nails, and the thumb.
Step Three: Scrub
Scrub your hands for a minimum of 20 seconds. The CDC recommends humming the “Happy Birthday” song twice through to measure the time.
Step Four: Rinse
Rinse off all of the soap and bubbles under running water.
Step Five: Dry
To finish off the process, simply dry your hands! It’s important to use a clean, dry towel or an air hand dryer. Make sure your hands are totally dry, because damp spots can be a breeding ground for more germs – the very thing you are trying to avoid.
Agility Health Is Ready to Celebrate!
Agility Health is proud to celebrate this year’s National Hand-Washing Awareness Week. As one of the leading caregiving services in the San Francisco Bay Area, we always provide top-notch, individualized care that makes your loved one a priority – and that includes making sure our hygiene practices are perfected. Our fully certified and screened nurses and caregivers understand the importance of stopping the transfer of germs, and we’re celebrating National Hand-Washing Awareness Week every week!
