Originally Posted by Adam D. RN2005
I remember my instructors as well as some older nurses tell me of a day when they cleaned poop without gloves. I was told they did this as late as the 1980's and that gloves are a really recent thing as a result of universal precautions.
Yep, it was a rule NOT to use gloves in nursing school for fear of offending the patient. Only sterile ones were available for the docs.
After graduation I worked peds in the ID floor and had all kinds of fun bugs to play with- no gloves-ever. After we got our first AIDS patient we got gloves for his room, only, when handling blood.
In 1994 we were told to use standard precautions for everyone when handling blood or bloody fluids. still on your own with poop and rota, cdiff, etc. Most of the nurses still started IV's without gloves, some used them only on big kids, but not on babies. At that point one of the LPNs thought we really should use gloves to change diapers with diarrhea, in fact, in an adeal world we would have gloves in every room, (GASP!). Never happened because 1)we all thought she was nuts, and 2) imagine what all those gloves would cost.
In 1996 we had one box of gloves in most rooms, no size choice. No enforcement or directive from TPTB, although the ID docs encouraged glove use. For the most part we depended on handwashing unless dealing with bloody fluids. I must say that group were handwashing queens though. They had sinks in every room, and in the hall. The hall sinks were the most used, and I haven't seen any since leaving that unit. I wonder if hall sinks would cause a measurable decrease in nosocomial infections on most units.
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