SuperPT

Hi everyone. I am not a nurse but rather a PT who works in a hospital. Our department recently had a meeting with infection control where we were told that gloves/PPE in hallways would no longer be acceptable. This impacts my job specifically because we ambulate patients in the hallway which often requires very close contact with the patient. I feel it is unsafe to take off my gloves/gown and have bare hand contact with a patient who is in isolation precautions for MRSA, VRE, or C.diff. Infection control's stance is that as long as we change the patient into a clean gown and have them do hand hygiene we should be fine touching them with our bare hands. However it happens very regularly that we may come into contact with bodily fluids unexpectedly, i.e. patients become incontinent while walking. I even had a patient with hep c once whose nose started bleeding so much that their gown was saturated and there was blood on the floor. In that situation letting go of the patient to don gloves would have resulted in the patient falling, but without gloves on I would have been exposed to hep c. I feel that as long as we touch nothing but the patient and do proper hand hygiene between patients we should be permitted to wear PPE in the hallway for our own protection. Do you all have any thoughts on this issue?