In the 2007 New Year Honours List, Didier Pittet was awarded the Honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire[1] (CBE) in recognition of his services related to the prevention of healthcare-associated infections in the UK.
[6] Since 2002, Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC) Planning Committee member Since 2011, Co-Chair, 1st International Conference on Prevention and Infection Control (ICPIC) Initial observation studies in Geneva by Pittet's team showed a low compliance with basic hand hygiene practices and a lack of awareness by healthcare workers that the main cause of cross-transmission of microorganisms is by hands.
Under Pittet's leadership, the team investigated concepts from the social sciences to help understand the determinants driving healthcare worker behaviour, which led to the creation of a multimodal strategy based on education, recognition of opportunities for hand hygiene, and feedback on performance where the key component was the introduction of alcohol-based hand rub at the point of care to replace handwashing at the sink ("system change"), thus bypassing the time constraint of the latter method.
[9] The first multimodal intervention ran from 1995 to 2000 at the University of Geneva Hospitals with a spectacular decrease of almost 50% in hospital-associated infections and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) transmission in parallel with a sustained improvement in compliance with hand hygiene.
[12][13] Pittet's vision is that to advance infection prevention and control strategies, it is essential to seek insight and innovation through other specialty fields, such as anthropology or sociology, or even engineering, computer science, mathematical modelling, and systems thinking.
[14][15][16] The mandate was to galvanise global commitment to tackle health-care associated infection, which had been identified as a significant area of risk for patients in all United Nations Member States.