Being practacal

Another fun filled day - today was a little bit of basic wound care, how to dress a wound in a sterile way, keeping your gloves sterile is hard work I tell you!

My friend's handy work - try and ignore my onsie ...

You almost start to feel guilty about the amount of gloves you get through though - while it's obviously necessary for some procedures, and in some cases (no one wants to be wiping someone's bum if you've got a cut on your hand!) - however we had a discussion about whether nurses overuse gloves. I'd be interested to hear anyone's thought's about this by the way, do we overuse gloves in the NHS? While there are many procedures that do require the use of gloves, there are equally many that don't! For example, emptying a catheter, while you as a nurse may want to use a pair of gloves while emptying it - do you actually have to? You won't be touching any part of the patient where they could pick up an infection from you, you wont be dousing your hands in urine (with any luck) and in all probability, your hands that you've just washed will be a damn site cleaner than the gloves from the box that's been sat at the nurses station for 3 weeks with 20 different people's hands going in and out.

For the record (and to cover my own arse) - I'm not saying that gloves shouldn't be used - not at all, we were just question weather they are being over used in wards today. Clearly there are many procedures where they're very important, but do patients always benefit from their use?