At one time you were hard pressed to get nurses to see that they needed to wear gloves to touch patients and potentially their bodily fluids. This was partly due to ignorance and partly due to the poor quality of said gloves which were made of some kind of polythene through which even the shortest and best kept nails could easily protrude. It is not so many years ago that a silly stoma care nurse of my acquaintance said that she didn’t like to use gloves when dealing with patients because it put a barrier between them and us. Personally, if I had a colostomy, I’d be wearing gloves to change my own bag thank you very much.
At the other end of that scale, I was in a traffic jam of 3 slow moving lanes a few months ago when a drew parallel with one of those hospital transport type ambulances (the type that takes elderly people from care homes to out patient appointments or to day care or what ever), when I saw a nurse (or someone dressed like one) sitting next to an elderly person and on her hands was a pair of latex type gloves. The patient / elderly person was sitting in their seat, fully clothed and it looked unlikely that they needed any obvious nursing care at that point in time on the motorway. I found the sight of the carer in this manner a little disturbing but this fitted in with some of the stories I have heard about carers wearing gloves all the time for fear probably that they would catch something.
Saturday was World Aids day and in the post I received a letter from the Terrance Higgins Trust about something called the ‘gloves off campaign’. It is hardly surprising that if elderly people are encountering gloved individuals during their day then patients with HIV and AIDS are more than likely encountering people who think they can catch something through just holding someones hand or touching them. People are quite rightly concerned about many types of infection and of course we want health professionals, patients and carers to take care about cross contamination of bugs and infections. What is clear however is that people are becoming so anxious about infections such as MRSA and C-Difficile that they are becoming obsessive about glove wear, and that doesn’t bode well when it comes to AIDS.
Wear your gloves, wash your hands, but please don’t wear those gloves just to touch someones hand or arm!
