Wear gloves during assessment?

[future_nurse11]

I am a new nursing student who started clinicals pretty recently. Im wondering.. Do you wear gloves when taking vitals & during a full-body assessment? I know to follow what the instructor says to do.. My instructor doesn't enforce that we wear gloves during assessments.. But would it be a good idea to do it anyway? I had another instructor before who said she wears gloves anytime she has pt interaction. Just wondering what's the norm & what's best health-wise.

[hppygr8ful, ASN, RN, EMT-I]

I am allergic to the gloves that my hospital uses, so I wear them sparingly and wash my hands a lot. I don't know what's worse, though -- the itching and break out from the gloves or from the constant hand washing.

If you have a documented latex allergy you facility must accommodate by providing you with hypoallergenic gloves or reimbursing you if you choose to buy your own.

Hppy

[Racer15, BSN, RN]

As an ER nurse, it all depends. Clean, neat child that fell and hurt their arm? I won't wear gloves. Patient with an abscess? Yep, glove up. And then there are times gloves don't matter. Had a pediatric pt with a cough and congestion. I was wearing gloves. Kid sneezed directly in my face. Kid ended up flu A+. Apparently wearing gloves does not protect you from airborne illnesses, who knew!! As an aside, I did not get the flu :)

[nursel56]

I have never once seen a patient consider being touched by a nurse's hand to be a violation of personal space or an invasion. I'm pretty good at picking up cues like that, too. The glove thing took a quantum leap forward due to fear-based misunderstanding of HIV/AIDS.

[RNsRWe, ASN, RN]

The World Health Organization Guidelines make sense to me. Note especially their pyramid of what type of glove use is appropriate and when.

http://www.who.int/gpsc/5may/Glove_Use_Information_Leaflet.pdf

If you are a patient and feel devalued as a person when you see me wearing gloves in an appropriate situation, speak up and I will explain my rationale to you.

If you are a patient and feel your boundaries are being violated when I touch you with bare hands, speak up and I will glove up.

Just don't expect that everyone feels the same as you and that I will somehow magically know these things about you.

This link is excellent, THANK you for posting it! It mentions that inappropriate use of gloves is not only wasteful of resources, but may contribute to ineffective hand hygiene as well. Someone had posted (on another thread, I think?) about how it's not really necessary to worry about how clean one's hands are (now I remember, the topic was artificial nails and contaminants r/t use). The rationale was that since we're *ALL* wearing gloves for everything, it doesn't much matter. REALLY off base, and the idea that gloves SHOULD be worn for every patient interraction obviously contributes to this error in thinking/judgement.

Gloves are not indicated for every patient contact; the WHO guideline is well written. Use them WHEN they are indicated, not ALWAYS "just because/maybe".

If I have a patient who prefers that I wear gloves "just because" (and there's no indication that there is actual necessity), then the onus is on that patient to ask me to put them on....and of course I would. But it's nonsensical to put them on "just because", as has been outlined so well in Infection Control publications.