Clinics and hospitals are environments that present a high risk of contamination, and hospital cleaning is an important tool for controlling the spread of diseases. Cleaning and hygiene are essential to provide a healthy environment free of disease-causing agents. Each type of environment requires specific cleaning techniques, suitable products and trained labor. In the hospital sector, this care must be redoubled.
As important as cleaning is the proper choice of PPE to be used during hospital cleaning. Rubber gloves, whether latex or nitrile with lining, are thick to increase protection and resistance against chemical products used in hospital hygiene. Despite being very safe, they need to be sanitized at the end of each cleaning, in addition to the need for a place for adequate drying and can often have an odor due to the retention of moisture associated with the user’s sweat.
With that in mind, intermediate thickness gloves, disposable, made of nitrile, with a thickness up to 3 times greater than procedure gloves, were launched on the market, providing greater resistance. These gloves, in addition to having the advantage of being discarded after use, eliminating the possibility of carrying potentially infectious agents from one area to another, reduce the cost of washing and drying the gloves.
Just as it is very important to change the cloths and solutions in the buckets at the end of each cleaning action of an area or furniture (both can lead to cross-infection), it is also very important to change or discard the gloves used in the cleaning process, especially when these are critical or semi-critical areas, where infection control must be even more rigorous.
For this reason, disposable gloves gained strength and established themselves as an important tool for Contact Precautions, justified mainly by the control of contamination.