Sterile gloves are counted as a necessity for health care workers during surgical procedures. We all know that sterile gloves must be changed when they are clearly torn, contaminated, suspected of contamination or when they are required due to isolation techniques (e.g. contact with tumors, intestinal lining, etc.).

In most cases, health care workers are busy treating patients at all times and are unlikely to change gloves "at the point where they are required to be changed", which inevitably leads to a large number of contaminated exposures that further increase the risk of infection for subsequent health care workers and patients.

During surgery, 66% of gloves are not changed at the "time of day" and more than half of gloves are used unreasonably by medical staff.

According to the study, 262 specimens were collected from gloves used at different times after removing the broken gloves, all of which showed bacterial contamination, with a 100% positive rate.

Disposable sterile surgical gloves were worn for 15 min, and the rate of glove breakage reached 30% when used for 90 min, and the rate of breakage increased significantly with the use of time.

When the gloves were worn for 3 hours, the breakage rate of the gloves reached 42%! The average breakage rate also reached 25.14%. [¹] So inadvertently, the gloves we wear may already have a tiny breakage that is not visible to the naked eye.

So how long is it appropriate to wear them for replacement? Generally during surgery, gloves need to be changed once in 90-150 minutes to prevent glove contamination and breakage.

Wearing gloves for 90 minutes or less resulted in 46 (15.4%) of 299 pairs of gloves having microperforations; wearing gloves for 91-150 minutes resulted in 54 (18.1%) of 299 pairs having perforations; wearing gloves for 150 minutes or more resulted in 71 (23.7%) of 300 pairs of gloves having perforations.