jewelry in the NICU

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I was just wondering what everyone's policy is on wearing jewelry in the NICU. When I first started we were only able to wear our wedding bands, no watch or stones of any kind due to the grooves where germs could be harbored. Now, we are unable to wear even our wedding bands. However visitors and parents are permited to wear all of there jewelry and are not even required to wear gowns when holding the babies anymore.

Just wanted to know your policies and opinions...Thanks!

DC the jewelry and see if the MRSA rate falls!

Staff already are have no jewelry; now we just need to work on parents and vistors.

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Specializes in NICU, PICU, educator.

Actually, our ID did do an investigation with jewelery and it wasn't found to be a source especially now that we are using the waterlesss hand cleaners. We are finding more kids that are pretty new that have it and the ones that go down to the main OR have it more also.

We recently had to ditch all the computer keyboards and get new ones with covers, which we have to wipe down 3X a day....they grew MRSA...heavily! Yuck!

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We recently had to ditch all the computer keyboards and get new ones with covers, which we have to wipe down 3X a day....they grew MRSA...heavily! Yuck!

We switched to computer charting from paper about a year ago much to our dismay. We are "supposed" to be charting as we go but our charting system is Mckesson and it is VERY SLOW for one and two our keyboards do not have covers and I don't even want to imagine what is growing on them. We wipe them down with our aniseptic wipes between pts but there is no way to get down between the keys and all the cracks.

Doesn't the list go on and on. This thread started with jewelry...

- jewelry

-OR

-family

-keyboards

-shared equipment

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All true. And now resistant bugs are in the community and CAN be brought in by families.

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Specializes in PICU, ICU, Transplant, Trauma, Surgical.

The staff in the NICU I work in is not allowed to wear rings, watches, bracelets etc. This is if you have patient contact. So nurses, therapists etc. As far as visitors, they are not allowed to wear rings (watches are accepted, but they must wear the watch during their 2 mintue up to the elbow scrub.) We also supply safety pins to pin rings to shirts.

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I hate seeing jewelry on nurses. We are allowed to wear one plain wedding band and that's it.

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Specializes in NICU and travel nursing.

What about wedding bands, like with a stone? I was planning on getting married and having a nice ring...what do you do with it? Wear it on a necklace?

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What about wedding bands, like with a stone? I was planning on getting married and having a nice ring...what do you do with it? Wear it on a necklace?

Some wear it on a necklace. A lot of the women I work with safety pin it to their bra straps. No stones are allowed on the hands.

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Specializes in NICU, CVICU.

I have my "real" wedding ring, a wide band with a stone in the center, that I wear when I'm not working. For my 5 year anniversary a couple of weeks ago, I got a plain white gold wedding band that I could wear to work. I'm not a "jewelry" person, but I wanted to have a band that I could wear just for work.

Other than that, I don't wear any jewelry.

On my unit I see nurses constantly ignoring the rules about fake nails, jewelry, hair up, proper footwear, etc. I wish it would be enforced a little better, but in the year I've been here people just ignore it. (And yes, we've had several runs of MRSA and Pseudomonas on our unit, we were even threatened with closing the doors if we couldn't stop the spread.)

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