overusing GLOVES

I wear gloves during every patient interaction because things can be unpredictable fast. My reasoning is also because I have 3 cats and I'm always gardening when the weather permits so at any given moment I have at least one cut or scratch on my hand.

If my facility had a shortage of gloves I would suck it up and throw down the whopping 4 dollars and change for my own box of sterile gloves(walmart has them for less than 5 bucks). Obviously this will be my own private supply. I'm not buying gloves for the whole hospital. I think its ridiculous for a facility to be in short supply of gloves. Sterilityis not a place where corners should be cut.

Boxes of nonsterile gloves didn't exist on the unit for the first five years I worked. We had sterile for procedures, and eventually got nonsterile, JUST in HIV+ rooms. I worked on the infectious disease unit, we used gowns whenever we went in the room, but handwashing was how we dealt with spreading germs on our hands. We had the lowest infection rate in the hospital, so immunocompromised patients were placed on our unit, and assigned to nurses with infectious patients. I KNOW handwashing works!

In nursing school we were taught not to use gloves, as we would make the patients feel rejected. I find gloves a real pain in the caboose. Especially in traumas, where you go from one task to another, hands get sweaty, and I can never get the second pair of gloves on after I do the first task. I prefer to wash between tasks, as long as I'm not dealing with straight blood soaking everything. Lots of folks are out there thinking about how gross it is to change diapers or soiled linen without gloves. It would be, if I touched the soiled surfaces. Most times you roll up the linen/diaper so the soiled area is covered, and pick it up on the clean surface. Of course, for a poopapalooza, you gotta glove, gown, and probably mask and shoecovers. I'm not totally gloveless, but I use less than a quarter of the average nurse at my facility.

I was taught that if it's wet, and not yours, wear gloves!

I've heard the cost could be high for not doing so.

I recently freaked out the other nurses by touching (bare-handed) the fontanel of a newly-born infant who had been dried off but not yet given a thorough bath. Apparently it had "gunk", and I was supposed to be horrified.

(For clarity, neither mom nor baby had any infectious diseases.)

Donning gloves for *any* physical contact is overkill.

I think having that extreme an approach shows a distinct *lack* of critical thinking skills. As nurses, we have the knowledge base to know when gloves are not necessary.

The healthcare workers I've seen put on gloves to check a blood pressure on every patient have been CNAs or MAs or nurses whose judgement I've already privately been questioning.

Things have changed over the decades. Yes, now we glove up for handling anything with patient fluids and when touching the patient.