Controversies in Hospital Infection Prevention: Gloves and gowns are not enough....
We gathered a great team over the years - Graham Snyder, Stephen Liang, Catherine Smith, Hannah Day and others to approach healthcare workers (HCW) before they entered patient rooms and collect cultures on their hands before entry and gowns/gloves after exiting the room. The initial study from this work was published by Graham Snyder et al in ICHE 2008. He reported that MRSA was detectable on 19% of gowns/gloves of HCW after exiting an MRSA+ patients room, while that result for VRE was 9%. The latest report from this group published in this month's ICHE by Dan Morgan et al, provides somewhat more humbling data. HCW had MDR-acinetobacter on their gloves 36% of the time after entering a colonized/infected patient's room. Wow. But the truly humbling finding was that after removing their gloves, 4.5% of the HCW still had it on their hands. Thus, while gloves reduce contamination of hands by around 85% per contact, to achieve true infection prevention, HCW must wash their hands after they remove there gloves.
