Medical gloves have been reminded that they are not a portable pardon for whatever their wearer touched before lunch. Hand hygiene guidance confirms that gloves can become contaminated, a revelation which has startled managers and anyone carrying a used pair in a coat pocket.
The advice is simple. Remove gloves when the job ends. Clean hands afterwards. Do not regard a slightly damp glove as a small blue force field against biology.
The thin blue line
At the Ministry of Cleanish Things, officials said the misunderstanding had grown from a powerful belief that putting on gloves turns a person into a surgeon, a detective and a morally untraceable figure at a buffet.
Professor Mavis Lather said gloves create useful protection when people use them properly. “They do not erase what happens next,” she explained. “A glove can touch a door handle, a trolley and a biscuit tin. Germs are famously unsentimental about uniforms.”
Staff will now receive training in the radical sequence of taking gloves off and washing their hands. One manager asked whether using two pairs removed the need for soap. Experts replied that two raincoats do not make a shower dry, then regretted making it sound like a challenge.
The guidance also mentions waste. This caused alarm among procurement teams who had ordered enough disposable gloves to give every stapler an evening pair and a sense of professional purpose.
Posters will appear above sinks. They will show the right moments for hand hygiene and one additional moment in which Kevin admits that a crumpled glove in his trouser pocket was never going to become a strategy.
Officials hope the message will now reach everyone who believes hand washing is a kind of administrative paperwork best completed by somebody else. The gloves were unavailable for comment, having been placed in a bin with considerably more clarity than usual.
