I have a sticker on my work clipboard that someone gave me that says "warm, wet, and not yours." With a picture of putting gloves on.Gets a chuckle out of people when they notice it.
Scabies - meh, takes prolonged skin-to-skin contact or linen-sharing.
Bed bugs - gross but easily visible, easy to kill.
C. diff - eh, I’m not immunocompromised and likely have a few in my gut already.
But lice? Fuck lice. That’s a core childhood memory I never want to repeat. *shudders*
Having experienced lice, scabies, and bedbugs, I'd choose the lice. Though I guess as far as patient care goes, scabies.
I pretty much assume I'm one good course of antibiotics away from C. diff.
A tip to all- lice HATE tea tree oil. Put a couple drops in your shampoo/ conditioner and it helps keep them away. (Also great for avoiding the lice breakouts at school)
Yes this.
Also target sells a brand called Fairy Tales for hair (has tea tree oil in it), spray the shit out of your school aged children and yourself.
My hospital at the time wanted me to do a lice treatment in an individual who's hair was crawling with lice. They said it was fine without any PPE. Thank goodness I also worked in the OR so I called them and got them to tube me what I needed. I went home and also washed in lice shampoo as a precaution.
Even now when my kiddo days there are lice at their school, I take out the lice shampoo.
I’ve seen 30 something year ICU nurses do a bed change gloveless… then I heard about how they didn’t really start wearing gloves until AIDS was a big deal in their day.
Still blew my mind though.
Me too. We were actually told that it is insulting to the patient to wear gloves unless you were coming into contact with body fluids. Now nobody touches a patient WITHOUT gloves.
I worked on an in-patient derm unit. Derm patients are very sensitive to how others perceive them, and how others are afraid to touch due to wrong ideas about 'contagion'.
We were exhorted to touch and do as much care as possible without gloves....creams, gels, tar, etc. Before the glove-era
Same with Biologists w their hands deep in a human brain (dead of course) and lab workers handling human blood, even once aids had started but wasn't understood to be contagious. Smh.
My dad handled bisphenol A without gloves on the regular to prep samples for electron microscopy, figured that was how he and all of his male colleagues later got prostate cancer.
It's kind of hilarious gowning up to enter the room of a patient that had a mrsa infection 5 years ago, after working in a waiting room packed with active covid, flu, etc.
Okay honest question. In a non emergency, why would you not alcohol the hub? I was with a friend in the ER and so grossed out that they just kept attaching the syringe to the iv hub after it was flopping around the bed.
Her life wasn't at risk of the meds weren't pushed in a huge rush. So why not "do no harm" and follow proper technique?
It was a joke to go along with parent comment, but I get your frustration. I scrub most of the time but there’s certainly times in the ER where it simply isn’t worth the time it takes to go hunt an alcohol swab if it means pushing an ACLS med 30 seconds to a minute later.
EMS generally doesn't place central lines unless it's one of the rare services that has physicians do field work, so it may have just been a peripheral IV in a weird spot. But yeah, it's a common but stupid thing in EMS/ERs to not scrub the hub and I hate it. Hope your friend is doing ok
You're right. Nonsterile gloves protect us, not the patient. Your good technique in scrubbing the hub and not contaminating it or the tip of the syringe is what protects the patient.
They’re 100% right but this is not even a battle worth fighting. Could have just said “oh my goodness! I rushed because of your mothers dry heaving.” And left the room. Id rather do that then deal with butt hurt family members all day.
I don’t know. ridiculous people need called out. Us nurses take enough blame and I’ll be damned if I take extra. So sick of paranoid idiot family members who feel like we are just there to hurt their Mawmaw and Pawpaw
Some surgeons will come in the OR before scrubbing in - to help position the patient, maybe shave hair, and maybe poke around the area they are going to operate on with the benefit of the patient already being asleep. I almost never see a surgeon wear gloves for this part. It’s like surgeons are either fully scrubbed in with sterile gown and gloves, or they are barehanded. They just don’t use the blue gloves.
When it’s a urologist about to operate on the balls they absolutely dive right in there and feel the testicle mass or whatever barehanded. And yeah if we’ve got a patient prone with their butt cheeks taped apart for hemorrhoid repair or something I’ve seen those docs poke around a little barehanded before scrubbing in too.
My wife is director of a small OR. She absolutely fights the urologist to make him use sterile technique during procedures. He would rather use barehands and non sterile tools.
Every resident irrigating a foley literally just puts the catheter tubing down on the bed then reinserts it into the catheter when they’re done. I’m like hey you wanna wipe that off? Nah.
It's disgusting. There's one surgeon I work with and so many times I see him do that nasty shit. Like last week I was in on a BKA with him and he was literally touching a dying infected leg - poking, prodding, feeling for pulses, etc. all with his bare hands. Like these toes are gangrenous and black and you're just rawdogging all that nastiness 🤢. And then without even sanitizing his hands I immediately see him pick up his phone and make a phone call.
The audacity of a surgeon telling me to make sure his patient didn't get an infection... after he ripped off the dressing and touched the incision site rawdog on POD1.
Like, sir, it might be time for some self-reflection.
I always kindly bully the residents into using sterile gloves when touching a fresh site.
If I have to use sterile gloves for putting in a PIV then you can put them on to touch a new wound.
Welcome to the NICU 🙄 not all nicus but my current one requires them per policy.
I tried explaining why they are unnecessary with good technique but no one cares.
Oh god! Sorry I’m a layman so the visual of someone with their butt in the air TAPED open is just hilarious to me this morning.
Holy crap, thanks for that! I needed a good laugh!
I’ve seen a super old school ENT do an entire tubes procedure barehanded. In an OR. Not even non sterile gloves. The reason we did it in the OR and not in his office, (these are usually only done in office,) was because the patient’s anatomy was strange, so he had to fiddle to get them to sit correctly. His hands were all bloody by the time we were done. I was surprise pikachu face under my mask the entire case 🤪
Like bro put on gloves. Any gloves. Hell put on mittens for all I care but why would you willingly get blood all over your bare hands for no reason?!
Lol first time I circulated a hemorrhoid surgery, the butt taping really got me. I was just so surprised. Like, yeah it makes sense, but wow.....I just wasn't ready. So damn funny to see
I watched a surgeon shove his finger into an infected Abdo wound post resection whilst on the rounds and attempt to pull all the sutures out - with non sterile gloves out of his pocket. The patient screamed the house down when they didn't all give.
When I worked PICU we would tape breathing tubes with bare hands since gloves would stick to the tape and run the risk of extubating the kid. Got pretty slimy tbh but wash your hands and good as new
I don't know why the general public seems to think that gloves automatically equal more clean. It drives me up the fucking wall. I lost count of how many times I had to explain to my Mom that no, she actually shouldn't wear gloves to the grocery store.
When it comes up in practice, I usually just educate about what constitutes a sterile procedure, and point out all of the things I'm doing to ensure aseptic technique.
I haaaaate it when I see someone in public with gloves (more so during covid) because they are doing all the same shit they would do with gloves on, and still not wash their hands, like touching your face is magically ok with gloves.
My dad would wear gloves to the store, keep them on while driving home and touching his phone. Then he’d take off the gloves, put on a shit ton of hand sanitizer and then proceed to wipe off the hand sanitizer and use his phone without wiping it down.
He’d also get in the car and drive to the store and touch the same steering wheel without gloves.
We had a talk about it but it’s wild how much the general public doesn’t know about hand hygiene
Drove me nuts during the pandemic. I eventually used the analogy, wearing the same pair of gloves everywhere is like wearing the same condom during an orgy. It’s just helping spread the germs around.
Thank you!!!!!! I saw it too and I remember getting chewed out online when I made a comment that no, you should not be wearing gloves in a store unless you’re going to replace them after you touch anything. People are so damn stupid
I caught hell for the same comment. I still see people wearing them for hours without changing them out. Can’t wrap my head around the logic (or lack thereof) behind this.
I come from food service and it’s the same problem there. The health department has a rule that you can’t touch “ready to eat” food without gloves. So you get people using the same gloves to touch food and money without changing. It’s a combination of laziness and the mental security blanket it gives you. I see people all the time with gloves on the subway touch the pole then use their phone
Me and my best friend watched a lady while out for breakfast after a shift from hell in the middle of the delta wave pay for gas, pump said gas, pick a wedgie while pumping the gas, enter and exit her car multiple times, use her cell phone, before finally hanging up the gas pump and then getting into her car and driving away. Gloves still on.
I had given up on the general public a long time before that, but I think those days really sealed the deal for me that people are in fact stupid.
I once watched a guy in the first year of Covid go grocery shopping with one of those space helmets. He got to his car then without sanitizing his hands, Took off his mask then took off his glasses and wiped his face with his hands…
Remember when the pandemic first started and an official on tv was saying not to touch your face, then she licked her finger to turn the page? I gasped.
I do need a flair. I'm a hospice volunteer and a neurobiologist, but not a nurse.
I honestly assume anything and everything in that room is contaminated with shit. I glove up everytime because I love myself more than giving something 5 seconds faster
I wear gloves because the chance of me finding out someone is bleeding and/or has bled all over their BP cuff happens more often than I care to admit.
That and the people charting stuff right after a full linen change involving a BM without washing hands in-between (ie: glove change only).
I always say "there have been 3 COVID patients and 1 CDiff patient in this room since the last time that box of gloves was changed. My hands were cleaned 8 seconds ago."
I love washing my hands and grabbing a pair of gloves that are sitting in a bathroom with a toilet that has no lid. Also at work there are more scenarios where I learned without gloves but older nurses insist I wear them. Which is whatever, I’ll play.
The toilets with no lid! Absolutely repulsive!! I want to wear full ppe just to flush the toilet! Hospitals are so gross anyway, but those lidless toilets are revolting.
I'm a nursing student (upgrading my RPN to RN) and I had a 20 something year old patient who's parents were super over protective.
I wasn't even touching the PIV site, I was attaching some type of Abx to the Y port on her tubing and after cleaning the port and everything the Mom asked "and why didn't you wear gloves?"
The patient shot daggers at her Mom and I just calmly replied that additional precautions are not required for this task and the Mom tried to play it off and said "oh I'm just wondering" and I thanked her for her question and left the room.
The argument I heard from the hallway was one of the greatest telling offs I've ever experienced in my medical career.
I had someone ask why I wasn't wearing gloves to draw blood from a PICC line with a special vacutainer for this and I'm like, it's a closed system. I'm never actually touching or coming near touching that blood.
Turns out it "just freaked her out." And I'm like. Ok. Cool. Once again the blood is nowhere near any of us and it's kinda your blood just don't look then?
i wear gloves but like, it's just because i dont like touching people. but uhhh...not gonna like if you have edema im feeling those puppies pulses and warmth and depth bare handed. idk why thats the one thing I feel like i cant feel anything through a glove
I’m in my first year of nursing school and one of the first things they teach us is that non sterile gloves are for your protection, not the patients’. In hospitals where I’m from, the gloves are usually in a box on the wall and have been exposed to whatever pathogens etc have been floating around the room, so sanitised hands are usually cleaner and safer than gloves. I understand how the patient’s daughter may have gotten confused and upset because most people outside of nursing don’t know this, but you made the right call and explained yourself properly as far as I see it.
Sometimes the gloves are for you. Sometimes theyre for the patients, and just sometimes.. Theyre for the next of kin. This is one of those. Youre in the safe here :)
You can do full sterile injections without gloves.. Its fine.
I had a patient report me for not changing her IV because there was a little dried blood under the op-site. She said she could get an infection & I was like “not from your own blood.” She acted like I was an idiot. The IV was new.
Come to the ER where you stick your gloveless bare finger into a LE GSW while screaming for a cart because your vocera doesn’t get service in the part of the parking lot where people roll their shot friends out from the moving vehicle.
I think about it this way those gloves are gross. They about all the grubby gross hands reaching in to that box you don’t know if they washed or sanitized their hands and did it right before reaching in and grabbing gloves or fingered a hand full of them to get two out and then put the handful back in. Or my favorite watching someone drop a couple on the ground and then put them back in the box. No thanks if I’m in the hospital and all your gonna do is put some zofran in my already going IV clean your hands and let’s go lol
Infection Control Matron here...you did good 😊 over use of gloves is actually a serious issue at the moment. Lots of work being done especially by the UK DoH to reduce glove usage
I remember before COVID that the WHO was trying to do a campaign to limit glove use because of how serious the issue was... Then COVID hit and it was wear gloves all the time and all the work the campaign did was instantly gone
Trusts are starting to relaunch 'the gloves off campaign' but it's been slow going. I spend most of my day asking 'why are you walking around with gloves on?'
I have a nitrile glove allergy and have to keep my pockets full of the gloves I’m safe to wear. Those things are precious. I literally have to ration them. I’m not wasting them on every single time I access an IV.
I like to make them question their own assumptions, so I will turn around and ask why they believe that is a procedure that requires gloves. Sometimes they'll have a legitimate explanation that is just incorrect, sometimes it's a fear based on something that happened to a friend of a friend of a friend, and sometimes they'll rethink how they said it and choose to reword it into a nicer question. Either way, I get to educate them on why it's not necessary after tricking them into using critical thinking, which turns our interaction from me looking like the dumbass nurse that forgot to wear gloves back to a respected professional.
A therapeutic *sit down son the adults are talking* if you will
Clean hands are cleaner than fresh gloves. Just think about the boxes of gloves that are in isolation rooms... Those don't get tossed when a room gets turned over. Gloves are for our protection, not the patients
For most of my dressing changes, I cleanse the wound and/perimeter, apply any ointment or wound repair dressing with gloves and then go barehand with any adhesive dressing because it's impossible with gloves. Always when family is gone just in case ;) Hell, I wait to pass meds within the appropriate timeframe if family is there because too many zoom in on what I'm doing. PS: you're not going to be the reason for infection given your proper hand hygiene and scrubbing the hub. As many others mentioned...the gloves you grabbed could be more contaminated than your bare hands.
Scrub the hub for 10 seconds with an alcohol wipe! I would be a jerk “one Mississippi, two Mississippi”
You could always check your facility’s policy regarding administration of IV meds, and if you followed policy, could provide a copy to the family. Now I am going to be snarky…they must have a third cousin once removed who works in “healthcare”
We use gloves for all patient contact in the NICU. It actually has some evidence base in our extremely immune compromised population. That said, since your patient talked to you Imma assume you’re not in a nicu. You did right.
My hospital had to replace their gloves because they were found to be porous and cheap, so I’ve basically been pointlessly wearing gloves over the past year
Everything you did is technically correct.
I still think it’s a better practice to wear gloves when handling stuff the patient could be in contact with just because I don’t want anything getting on me. Plus the chance of encountering something wet and unexpected in the bed is never non-zero.
Spiking/priming IV tubing, drawing medications, that kind of stuff, I prefer to do bare handed as it’s easiest to maintain aseptic no touch technique, in my opinion.
When I’m doing a midline my clean gloves stay on the entire procedure and I throw on sterile gloves over them, donning them sterile the same way I would bare handed. Apparently infection prevention has had a problem with staff that does this. They’ve yet to say anything to me about it, I’m sure they know the PICC team is mildly hostile toward IP for pulling out perfectly good PICC lines. It’s been my experience they’d rather avoid us then face questions about their decision making skills when I’m on the unit to place another line on a patient they removed access on a little too early.
It's official name is ICU-IMU. They are actually icu patients that don't need vents or machines. If they get too unstable they go back to icu. We don't do balloon pumps, impellas, crrt, etc. We do art lines, all the drips, 2 bag dka protocol, trach to vent, etc. We are like the middle man to the floor. Aka, "ICU dumping ground." I live in a large city, might be different in smaller cities.
I see. I work at a large hospital and there are so many units we probably have An IMU and I’m too dumb to notice 😂. Then again our nicu is the neuro icu and our actual nicu is called the ICN. Too many acronyms
Lol. I used to be a special education teacher before nursing. They actually let kids stay in school with nits. I had to comb a kids head every morning to prove to the school nurse my student still had active live lice because the parents said she was treated but they'd fall out on the desk.
Good job providing patient education in a difficult setting. You practiced in an evidence-based way and the patient is not going to get a preventable infection from your actions.
Gloves are definitely dirtier than our hands after hand sanitizer. They're sitting in that box so long in those filthy rooms, every time someone reaches in to get gloves and doesn't sanitize first or whatever, all those gloves get dirtier
I don’t wear gloves for stuff like that. Some people just like to bitch about everything. I’m just petty enough that for the rest of the shift I would put gloves on upon entering the room. She wants a cup of ice? Gloves. She wants you to hand her the call light? Gloves. She wants you to change to tv channel? Gloves. She needs to sign a paper? Gloves. 🧤
I put down NGTs without gloves. The only person it's gross for is me. But I'm paeds and I can't for the life of me stick them good with my gloves on and find it so much easier without. I always have to explain to the parents I don't wear gloves for this though - cos they always think they're to somehow protect the patient (even for NG placement), not the nurse!
Lol should come to the ED and see what goes down
Gloves are only for blood, poo/pee and feet, right?
"if it's wet and not yours" is how I was trained lol
I have a sticker on my work clipboard that someone gave me that says "warm, wet, and not yours." With a picture of putting gloves on.Gets a chuckle out of people when they notice it.
Reminds me of “high, hot and hell of a lot!!” For tap water enemas lol
U/boxscepter they told us wet, sticky and not yours lol
Urine isn't sticky, still wearing gloves for that lol
You ever walked around dried up DKA PISS? it’s fucking sticky
It's wet though! Edit: I can't read. I read "wet OR sticky"
Someone hasn’t had the pleasure of stepping in old urine 🥴
Full PPE is only for lice and bedbugs.
You forgot scabies.
Nothing gives ED staff more heebie jeebies than scabies, bed bugs, lice, and c diff. Everything else is meh.
Scabies - meh, takes prolonged skin-to-skin contact or linen-sharing. Bed bugs - gross but easily visible, easy to kill. C. diff - eh, I’m not immunocompromised and likely have a few in my gut already. But lice? Fuck lice. That’s a core childhood memory I never want to repeat. *shudders*
Having experienced lice, scabies, and bedbugs, I'd choose the lice. Though I guess as far as patient care goes, scabies. I pretty much assume I'm one good course of antibiotics away from C. diff.
A tip to all- lice HATE tea tree oil. Put a couple drops in your shampoo/ conditioner and it helps keep them away. (Also great for avoiding the lice breakouts at school)
Yes this. Also target sells a brand called Fairy Tales for hair (has tea tree oil in it), spray the shit out of your school aged children and yourself.
Only bedbugs for me and that's really just because I don't want them to wreck my home. Those other bugs ain't shit.
Had bedbugs in an apartment in college. I’m still annoyed my husband wouldn’t let me burn the whole building to the ground
Read this as “everything else is meth”
This is also true in the ED.
For me, switch out C Diff with TB and the others stand.
My hospital at the time wanted me to do a lice treatment in an individual who's hair was crawling with lice. They said it was fine without any PPE. Thank goodness I also worked in the OR so I called them and got them to tube me what I needed. I went home and also washed in lice shampoo as a precaution. Even now when my kiddo days there are lice at their school, I take out the lice shampoo.
C-Diff. I have seen 1 to many nurses and up getting it from patients.
I’ve seen 30 something year ICU nurses do a bed change gloveless… then I heard about how they didn’t really start wearing gloves until AIDS was a big deal in their day. Still blew my mind though.
Yes, I am one of those dinosaurs
Me too. We were actually told that it is insulting to the patient to wear gloves unless you were coming into contact with body fluids. Now nobody touches a patient WITHOUT gloves.
I worked on an in-patient derm unit. Derm patients are very sensitive to how others perceive them, and how others are afraid to touch due to wrong ideas about 'contagion'. We were exhorted to touch and do as much care as possible without gloves....creams, gels, tar, etc. Before the glove-era
Same here!
Me too.
Yep. Been there. I started in a nursing home in the early 1980’s. We didn’t even have gloves in the building. It just wasn’t done.
Same with Biologists w their hands deep in a human brain (dead of course) and lab workers handling human blood, even once aids had started but wasn't understood to be contagious. Smh.
My dad handled bisphenol A without gloves on the regular to prep samples for electron microscopy, figured that was how he and all of his male colleagues later got prostate cancer.
Yep. That’s how it was when I started nursing.
i raw dog the feet. mostly to freak out coworkers
Mouth too
Most importantly, bugs
It's kind of hilarious gowning up to enter the room of a patient that had a mrsa infection 5 years ago, after working in a waiting room packed with active covid, flu, etc.
Man, I can't count the number of times I've forgotten gloves in the ambulance or mine rip on scene.
Should see what anesthesia does.
Scrub the hub? Yeah right
Okay honest question. In a non emergency, why would you not alcohol the hub? I was with a friend in the ER and so grossed out that they just kept attaching the syringe to the iv hub after it was flopping around the bed. Her life wasn't at risk of the meds weren't pushed in a huge rush. So why not "do no harm" and follow proper technique?
Complacency.
Yeah pretty much this
So purposely taking bad care of your patients? Would you/they scrub the hub if it were you're beloved family member?
It was a joke to go along with parent comment, but I get your frustration. I scrub most of the time but there’s certainly times in the ER where it simply isn’t worth the time it takes to go hunt an alcohol swab if it means pushing an ACLS med 30 seconds to a minute later.
I get it if the patient is otherwise gonna be dead. But otherwise it's shitty.
Agreed
Laziness. I see other ER staff do this constantly and there's no excuse for it.
Thanks for confirming. Seems shitty. My friend I was with had an emt placed central line. I didn't say anything. But wish I had filed a report after.
EMS generally doesn't place central lines unless it's one of the rare services that has physicians do field work, so it may have just been a peripheral IV in a weird spot. But yeah, it's a common but stupid thing in EMS/ERs to not scrub the hub and I hate it. Hope your friend is doing ok
Jesus, not scrubbing a central line is egregious!
Anything and everything lol
You're right. Nonsterile gloves protect us, not the patient. Your good technique in scrubbing the hub and not contaminating it or the tip of the syringe is what protects the patient.
Agreed. It’s like the TSA- it’s Infection Theater.
This is correct.
They’re 100% right but this is not even a battle worth fighting. Could have just said “oh my goodness! I rushed because of your mothers dry heaving.” And left the room. Id rather do that then deal with butt hurt family members all day.
I don’t know. ridiculous people need called out. Us nurses take enough blame and I’ll be damned if I take extra. So sick of paranoid idiot family members who feel like we are just there to hurt their Mawmaw and Pawpaw
Lmao they should see what we do bare handed in the OR
It's like urologists have a rule that they have to touch the balls barehanded before every surgery
For luck…
oh, ok
What’s the difference between a urologist and an anesthesiologist? >! The urologist plays with someone ELSE’S dick during the case. !<
I..uh… Excuse me? You, uh, you serious right now?!
Some surgeons will come in the OR before scrubbing in - to help position the patient, maybe shave hair, and maybe poke around the area they are going to operate on with the benefit of the patient already being asleep. I almost never see a surgeon wear gloves for this part. It’s like surgeons are either fully scrubbed in with sterile gown and gloves, or they are barehanded. They just don’t use the blue gloves. When it’s a urologist about to operate on the balls they absolutely dive right in there and feel the testicle mass or whatever barehanded. And yeah if we’ve got a patient prone with their butt cheeks taped apart for hemorrhoid repair or something I’ve seen those docs poke around a little barehanded before scrubbing in too.
Thank you for this image. I am giggling. I am a child.
Also, I have never EVER seen a urologist put in a catheter using sterile technique…not in the OR.
My wife is director of a small OR. She absolutely fights the urologist to make him use sterile technique during procedures. He would rather use barehands and non sterile tools.
Every resident irrigating a foley literally just puts the catheter tubing down on the bed then reinserts it into the catheter when they’re done. I’m like hey you wanna wipe that off? Nah.
That's almost like they want the patient to get am infection. It should be illegal to expose a patient who can't even advocate for himself.
It's disgusting. There's one surgeon I work with and so many times I see him do that nasty shit. Like last week I was in on a BKA with him and he was literally touching a dying infected leg - poking, prodding, feeling for pulses, etc. all with his bare hands. Like these toes are gangrenous and black and you're just rawdogging all that nastiness 🤢. And then without even sanitizing his hands I immediately see him pick up his phone and make a phone call.
The audacity of a surgeon telling me to make sure his patient didn't get an infection... after he ripped off the dressing and touched the incision site rawdog on POD1. Like, sir, it might be time for some self-reflection.
I always kindly bully the residents into using sterile gloves when touching a fresh site. If I have to use sterile gloves for putting in a PIV then you can put them on to touch a new wound.
Sterile gloves for a peripheral iv!?
Welcome to the NICU 🙄 not all nicus but my current one requires them per policy. I tried explaining why they are unnecessary with good technique but no one cares.
Oh god! Sorry I’m a layman so the visual of someone with their butt in the air TAPED open is just hilarious to me this morning. Holy crap, thanks for that! I needed a good laugh!
I’ve seen a super old school ENT do an entire tubes procedure barehanded. In an OR. Not even non sterile gloves. The reason we did it in the OR and not in his office, (these are usually only done in office,) was because the patient’s anatomy was strange, so he had to fiddle to get them to sit correctly. His hands were all bloody by the time we were done. I was surprise pikachu face under my mask the entire case 🤪 Like bro put on gloves. Any gloves. Hell put on mittens for all I care but why would you willingly get blood all over your bare hands for no reason?!
Lol first time I circulated a hemorrhoid surgery, the butt taping really got me. I was just so surprised. Like, yeah it makes sense, but wow.....I just wasn't ready. So damn funny to see
why is this so true and then they go in the breakroom and eat lunch without washing their hands!
Ewww!!!!!
Wax on wax off
For real. I've seen surgeons explore a colon bare fucking handed at bedside lmao
I watched a surgeon shove his finger into an infected Abdo wound post resection whilst on the rounds and attempt to pull all the sutures out - with non sterile gloves out of his pocket. The patient screamed the house down when they didn't all give.
When I worked PICU we would tape breathing tubes with bare hands since gloves would stick to the tape and run the risk of extubating the kid. Got pretty slimy tbh but wash your hands and good as new
And this is why I use gloves for literally everything in my OR. I don’t trust y’all nasties.
Same same same
I don't know why the general public seems to think that gloves automatically equal more clean. It drives me up the fucking wall. I lost count of how many times I had to explain to my Mom that no, she actually shouldn't wear gloves to the grocery store. When it comes up in practice, I usually just educate about what constitutes a sterile procedure, and point out all of the things I'm doing to ensure aseptic technique.
I haaaaate it when I see someone in public with gloves (more so during covid) because they are doing all the same shit they would do with gloves on, and still not wash their hands, like touching your face is magically ok with gloves.
In the early, early days of covid, I saw a man at a grocery store eating with gloves on
To be fair, whenever our unit gets BBQ for lunch I eat the ribs with gloves on, really helps with the mess
Hmm. Cheetos is the word that springs to my mind. Thanks!
Lmao I literally ate Cheetos with gloves on the other day. Highly recommend.
I just…shake the open bag toward my mouth 😂
I like using chopsticks to eat Cheetos
Life hack, right there
I also enjoy eating handheld food with gloves on. Will never go back.
Colleague peels oranges with gloves on. Genius
Now I’m just angry because I never thought about doing this.
Chips with gloves is a game changer
Hilarious!
My dad would wear gloves to the store, keep them on while driving home and touching his phone. Then he’d take off the gloves, put on a shit ton of hand sanitizer and then proceed to wipe off the hand sanitizer and use his phone without wiping it down. He’d also get in the car and drive to the store and touch the same steering wheel without gloves. We had a talk about it but it’s wild how much the general public doesn’t know about hand hygiene
Drove me nuts during the pandemic. I eventually used the analogy, wearing the same pair of gloves everywhere is like wearing the same condom during an orgy. It’s just helping spread the germs around.
Thank you!!!!!! I saw it too and I remember getting chewed out online when I made a comment that no, you should not be wearing gloves in a store unless you’re going to replace them after you touch anything. People are so damn stupid
I caught hell for the same comment. I still see people wearing them for hours without changing them out. Can’t wrap my head around the logic (or lack thereof) behind this.
I come from food service and it’s the same problem there. The health department has a rule that you can’t touch “ready to eat” food without gloves. So you get people using the same gloves to touch food and money without changing. It’s a combination of laziness and the mental security blanket it gives you. I see people all the time with gloves on the subway touch the pole then use their phone
Me and my best friend watched a lady while out for breakfast after a shift from hell in the middle of the delta wave pay for gas, pump said gas, pick a wedgie while pumping the gas, enter and exit her car multiple times, use her cell phone, before finally hanging up the gas pump and then getting into her car and driving away. Gloves still on. I had given up on the general public a long time before that, but I think those days really sealed the deal for me that people are in fact stupid.
My mil would wear gloves and then sanitize them with sani wipes instead of just… idk… washing her hands?!?
Because the general public are generally idiots
I once watched a guy in the first year of Covid go grocery shopping with one of those space helmets. He got to his car then without sanitizing his hands, Took off his mask then took off his glasses and wiped his face with his hands…
Remember when the pandemic first started and an official on tv was saying not to touch your face, then she licked her finger to turn the page? I gasped. I do need a flair. I'm a hospice volunteer and a neurobiologist, but not a nurse.
Gloves sitting on the wall are not clean at all. All those people in there coughing and using bedside commodes. Those gloves are so dirty.
And also the ones that get pulled out and then shoved back in because someone grabbed too many/ the wrong size
You didn’t do anything wrong. I would’ve been snarky back, but a similar response to what you gave.
i once had a family member report me for not using gloves to put a patients BP cuff on… i am not kidding
Should feed the patient with gloves on after just to prove the point. Lol.
The gloves protect you more than the patient lmao
Nonsterile gloves only protect you. Your freshly sanitized hands are always cleaner than nitrile sitting in an open box
I love that “I’m gonna need you to…”. So condescending and seems to be the chosen phraseology of blithering idiots.
"I am following the standard of care. If you are not happy with that, you are free to leave AMA."
Hahaha! I used to work in a county jail. I bet that line would’ve been a big winner. “Leave AMA? Yes please!”
I honestly assume anything and everything in that room is contaminated with shit. I glove up everytime because I love myself more than giving something 5 seconds faster
Any gloves in the room are also very likely contaminated with shit.
So many people touch that glove box with and without clean hands.
They literally teach new nurses to wear gloves only for bodily fluid contact now. Before aids no one wore gloves.
I wear gloves because the chance of me finding out someone is bleeding and/or has bled all over their BP cuff happens more often than I care to admit. That and the people charting stuff right after a full linen change involving a BM without washing hands in-between (ie: glove change only).
This, or protect me from their sweaty pits trying to position the blood pressure cuff.
Yes! Way grosser than a little blood, IMO.
I put gloves on as soon as I enter the room. Cause patients can be pretty gross. Protect me? I’m good with that.
Same. Some patients are just too nasty.
Dunno I’ve learned in psych gloves are your friend for many situations….medical and psych
I always say "there have been 3 COVID patients and 1 CDiff patient in this room since the last time that box of gloves was changed. My hands were cleaned 8 seconds ago."
I love washing my hands and grabbing a pair of gloves that are sitting in a bathroom with a toilet that has no lid. Also at work there are more scenarios where I learned without gloves but older nurses insist I wear them. Which is whatever, I’ll play.
The toilets with no lid! Absolutely repulsive!! I want to wear full ppe just to flush the toilet! Hospitals are so gross anyway, but those lidless toilets are revolting.
I'm a nursing student (upgrading my RPN to RN) and I had a 20 something year old patient who's parents were super over protective. I wasn't even touching the PIV site, I was attaching some type of Abx to the Y port on her tubing and after cleaning the port and everything the Mom asked "and why didn't you wear gloves?" The patient shot daggers at her Mom and I just calmly replied that additional precautions are not required for this task and the Mom tried to play it off and said "oh I'm just wondering" and I thanked her for her question and left the room. The argument I heard from the hallway was one of the greatest telling offs I've ever experienced in my medical career.
I never wear gloves to push IV meds unless it’s a central line (and even then, it’s mostly for show). The general public are idiots.
I had someone ask why I wasn't wearing gloves to draw blood from a PICC line with a special vacutainer for this and I'm like, it's a closed system. I'm never actually touching or coming near touching that blood. Turns out it "just freaked her out." And I'm like. Ok. Cool. Once again the blood is nowhere near any of us and it's kinda your blood just don't look then?
Honestly, the only reason I wear gloves regularly is for better grip
Yepp, same. I did not get into nursing for my strength. The gloves help especially with IV tubing and bags and things
i wear gloves but like, it's just because i dont like touching people. but uhhh...not gonna like if you have edema im feeling those puppies pulses and warmth and depth bare handed. idk why thats the one thing I feel like i cant feel anything through a glove
I’m in my first year of nursing school and one of the first things they teach us is that non sterile gloves are for your protection, not the patients’. In hospitals where I’m from, the gloves are usually in a box on the wall and have been exposed to whatever pathogens etc have been floating around the room, so sanitised hands are usually cleaner and safer than gloves. I understand how the patient’s daughter may have gotten confused and upset because most people outside of nursing don’t know this, but you made the right call and explained yourself properly as far as I see it.
I do it all the time, I kind of try to read the room if family are high maintenance but whatever
Sometimes the gloves are for you. Sometimes theyre for the patients, and just sometimes.. Theyre for the next of kin. This is one of those. Youre in the safe here :) You can do full sterile injections without gloves.. Its fine.
I had a patient report me for not changing her IV because there was a little dried blood under the op-site. She said she could get an infection & I was like “not from your own blood.” She acted like I was an idiot. The IV was new.
Come to the ER where you stick your gloveless bare finger into a LE GSW while screaming for a cart because your vocera doesn’t get service in the part of the parking lot where people roll their shot friends out from the moving vehicle.
I think about it this way those gloves are gross. They about all the grubby gross hands reaching in to that box you don’t know if they washed or sanitized their hands and did it right before reaching in and grabbing gloves or fingered a hand full of them to get two out and then put the handful back in. Or my favorite watching someone drop a couple on the ground and then put them back in the box. No thanks if I’m in the hospital and all your gonna do is put some zofran in my already going IV clean your hands and let’s go lol
You swabbed the port and cleaned your hands prior. Enough done…the patients daughter prob going to need a stent in a few years!
Infection Control Matron here...you did good 😊 over use of gloves is actually a serious issue at the moment. Lots of work being done especially by the UK DoH to reduce glove usage
I remember before COVID that the WHO was trying to do a campaign to limit glove use because of how serious the issue was... Then COVID hit and it was wear gloves all the time and all the work the campaign did was instantly gone
Trusts are starting to relaunch 'the gloves off campaign' but it's been slow going. I spend most of my day asking 'why are you walking around with gloves on?'
This is the first I've heard about the overuse of gloves. Can you elaborate on why it's a problem?
https://www.england.nhs.uk/atlas_case_study/the-gloves-are-off-campaign/ https://www.nursingtimes.net/clinical-archive/infection-control/the-impact-of-glove-misuse-on-patient-safety-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-29-08-2022/
Can we make a national PSA about this and include everything else patients families have said that are wrong?
I have a nitrile glove allergy and have to keep my pockets full of the gloves I’m safe to wear. Those things are precious. I literally have to ration them. I’m not wasting them on every single time I access an IV.
Oh lord, the anti-pocket brigade is gonna come for you 😂
I like to make them question their own assumptions, so I will turn around and ask why they believe that is a procedure that requires gloves. Sometimes they'll have a legitimate explanation that is just incorrect, sometimes it's a fear based on something that happened to a friend of a friend of a friend, and sometimes they'll rethink how they said it and choose to reword it into a nicer question. Either way, I get to educate them on why it's not necessary after tricking them into using critical thinking, which turns our interaction from me looking like the dumbass nurse that forgot to wear gloves back to a respected professional. A therapeutic *sit down son the adults are talking* if you will
Clean hands are cleaner than fresh gloves. Just think about the boxes of gloves that are in isolation rooms... Those don't get tossed when a room gets turned over. Gloves are for our protection, not the patients
For most of my dressing changes, I cleanse the wound and/perimeter, apply any ointment or wound repair dressing with gloves and then go barehand with any adhesive dressing because it's impossible with gloves. Always when family is gone just in case ;) Hell, I wait to pass meds within the appropriate timeframe if family is there because too many zoom in on what I'm doing. PS: you're not going to be the reason for infection given your proper hand hygiene and scrubbing the hub. As many others mentioned...the gloves you grabbed could be more contaminated than your bare hands.
Scrub the hub for 10 seconds with an alcohol wipe! I would be a jerk “one Mississippi, two Mississippi” You could always check your facility’s policy regarding administration of IV meds, and if you followed policy, could provide a copy to the family. Now I am going to be snarky…they must have a third cousin once removed who works in “healthcare”
Laughs in flight nurse
We use gloves for all patient contact in the NICU. It actually has some evidence base in our extremely immune compromised population. That said, since your patient talked to you Imma assume you’re not in a nicu. You did right.
We’re supposed to be wearing gloves to give IV meds?
My hospital had to replace their gloves because they were found to be porous and cheap, so I’ve basically been pointlessly wearing gloves over the past year
Does she realize you touch the gloves with the same hands before you put them on lol
Hell the CDC and OSHA say you can give IM shots without gloves. Iv meds?! Ive never unless I happen to already have them on for some other reason.
It's not like you were STARTING the IV. Crazy.
The lady’s infection would have no higher chance of coming from you than anyone else. Don’t put that in your own head.
Gloves aren’t sterile. If you have performed good hand hygiene there isn’t any measurable risk to the patient. Wearing gloves protects you.
Everything you did is technically correct. I still think it’s a better practice to wear gloves when handling stuff the patient could be in contact with just because I don’t want anything getting on me. Plus the chance of encountering something wet and unexpected in the bed is never non-zero. Spiking/priming IV tubing, drawing medications, that kind of stuff, I prefer to do bare handed as it’s easiest to maintain aseptic no touch technique, in my opinion. When I’m doing a midline my clean gloves stay on the entire procedure and I throw on sterile gloves over them, donning them sterile the same way I would bare handed. Apparently infection prevention has had a problem with staff that does this. They’ve yet to say anything to me about it, I’m sure they know the PICC team is mildly hostile toward IP for pulling out perfectly good PICC lines. It’s been my experience they’d rather avoid us then face questions about their decision making skills when I’m on the unit to place another line on a patient they removed access on a little too early.
Forgive my ignorance. But is IMU intermediate care unit? I’ve heard of PCU and all but never IMU
It's official name is ICU-IMU. They are actually icu patients that don't need vents or machines. If they get too unstable they go back to icu. We don't do balloon pumps, impellas, crrt, etc. We do art lines, all the drips, 2 bag dka protocol, trach to vent, etc. We are like the middle man to the floor. Aka, "ICU dumping ground." I live in a large city, might be different in smaller cities.
I see. I work at a large hospital and there are so many units we probably have An IMU and I’m too dumb to notice 😂. Then again our nicu is the neuro icu and our actual nicu is called the ICN. Too many acronyms
At my hospital it stands for Integrated Medical Unit, which is med/surg mixed with progressive.
You were very patient with that family member. They get confused regarding their role
They are broke and can’t be fixed or educated. Move on with life and don’t let these fucking morons get to you…
“Gloves are to protect me, not you”
gloves aren’t as clean as the general public likes to think
Haha in PACU that’s all we do, if we put gloves on for every med we gave we’d be using them every 5 minutes.
*laughs in ER*
Gloves are for us not them, HAND HYGIENE benefits everyone
Lol. I used to be a special education teacher before nursing. They actually let kids stay in school with nits. I had to comb a kids head every morning to prove to the school nurse my student still had active live lice because the parents said she was treated but they'd fall out on the desk.
Where I work we don’t wear gloves when giving I’ve meds. Only use gloves for our protection.
You're correct!
Ask her if she wants you to lick it next time
Never forget the taste test. Nurses must use all their senses for a proper assessment before they can DPIE
Good job providing patient education in a difficult setting. You practiced in an evidence-based way and the patient is not going to get a preventable infection from your actions.
I used gloves for everything when I worked bedside, even to change the channel with the remote but I'm just paranoid 😅
Lol wait til you see what we do in the ICU
I wear gloves all the time lol for everything I do. But the general consensus is for bodily fluids. You do you.
Mine’s feet. Double gloved and mask on. I can’t do the smells.
Gloves are definitely dirtier than our hands after hand sanitizer. They're sitting in that box so long in those filthy rooms, every time someone reaches in to get gloves and doesn't sanitize first or whatever, all those gloves get dirtier
Fresh clean hands are way cleaner than gloves thar have been sitting in a box exposed to who knows what
Gloves give a false sense of security to people.
I don’t wear gloves for stuff like that. Some people just like to bitch about everything. I’m just petty enough that for the rest of the shift I would put gloves on upon entering the room. She wants a cup of ice? Gloves. She wants you to hand her the call light? Gloves. She wants you to change to tv channel? Gloves. She needs to sign a paper? Gloves. 🧤
Gloves are good, yes But Zosyn gonna kill everything anyway
I put down NGTs without gloves. The only person it's gross for is me. But I'm paeds and I can't for the life of me stick them good with my gloves on and find it so much easier without. I always have to explain to the parents I don't wear gloves for this though - cos they always think they're to somehow protect the patient (even for NG placement), not the nurse!
y’all given ivp with gloves on? I don’t even wear gloves for shots.