The Gloves are Off!
Throughout May the Infection Prevention and Control team will focus on raising awareness of hand hygiene and glove use. Launched by the Royal College of Nurses in 2018, Glove Awareness Week (2-6th May) and Great Ormond Street’s ‘Gloves off’ campaign aims to encourage appropriate glove use by raising awareness of sustainability factors and the importance of good skin health. Inappropriate glove use can lead to skin conditions like dermatitis as well as the spread of infection, as hand washing is forgone whilst wearing gloves.
Clearly, in some clinical situation it is vital to wear gloves: staff should wear them when in contact with blood or body fluids, non-intact skin, mucous membranes, harmful drugs or chemicals. But gloves are not needed during activities such as:
- touching a patient
- pushing a bed or a wheelchair
- Making and handing out hot drinks
- Dispensing medication
- Giving IM injections
- Checking blood pressure
Due to unnecessary glove use, around 1.1 billion gloves are used in the NHS each year which seriously contributes to the planet’s plastic and microplastic problem. The plastic gloves break down extremely slowly, and when they do, they break down into microplastics which then find their way back into the food chain, adversely affecting human and non-human health. Plastic glove pollution is pervasive as they find their way to beaches, ocean beds and urban environments and cause toxicity to rise in all these ecosystems through the release of additives or absorbed contaminants or pathogens.
As such, UHP’s sustainability team and the IPCT team are aligned on the importance of reducing unnecessary glove use and have been visiting wards to raise awareness of the infection and pollution risks associated with this. So far, staff have been engaged and interested in learning about the adverse effects of excessive glove use and it is our hope they’ll each make one small change to reduce the number of gloves they use.
To reward staff in this endeavour, 200 green points are available on Choosing Greener for reducing your glove use at work. Record your sustainable actions, compete with colleagues to top the leader board and win monthly vouchers!
