Putting protective equipment on, changing gloves and taking it off

Purpose

To get protective equipment on before it is needed, off without transferring what is on the outside of it to your hands, and changed at the moment it stops working rather than at the moment you notice.

When to use it

Three moments in every session: before the first container is opened, at any point a glove is compromised, and at the end. It is the step 13 that opening the laboratory names and the first item that closing it assumes has already been done.

Before you start

You should already have read the gloves section of protecting yourself and the glove reference, including its list of the substances for which this course could find no permeation figure at all. That list is why the change rule below is about contact rather than about the clock.

On the bench: the eye protection the page’s level asks for; a box of single-use nitrile gloves and a heavier unused pair in the spill kit; an apron; and one designated place, at the wet bench beside the waste container, where gloves go on and come off.

!What is sourced here and what is not

The principles are sourced: clean the gloves before removal, never let bare skin meet an outer surface, discard a single-use glove when it comes off, wash hands afterwards. The hand movements in steps 12 to 14, and the most-contaminated-first order of steps 11 to 16, follow from those principles rather than from a published protocol.

Procedure

Putting it on

1. Sleeves down or gauntlet gloves, closed shoes, apron on. The forearm goes into the tray and the feet are what a falling bottle reaches.
2. Eye protection on, and read the marking on it. Ordinary spectacles are not eye protection: no side protection, and a splash runs down behind the lens. Safety glasses to a stated standard are the Level A baseline; splash goggles sealing to the face are what Level B means.
3. Gloves last, and before the first cap comes off rather than after the first pour. They are the seventh and final control in the hierarchy; the six above them have already been applied.
4. Look at them before you work in them: pinholes, a split seam, a tear, a perished cuff. Penetration is the only one of the three glove failures you can find by looking.
5. Decide now what will end this pair — which is to say, read step 7 before you need it rather than during it.

Changing a glove during the session

6. Change on any splash, smear or mark, at once. Where the course has no published breakthrough time — silver nitrate is the case that matters most — the control is a short contact time and prompt replacement, because there is no figure to work to.
7. Change when the material itself has altered: hardened, softened, swollen, gone tacky or changed colour. That is degradation, and a degraded glove’s resistance to permeation has already collapsed.
8. Change at a family boundary. A glove that has been in the fixer does not go back to the developer, for the same reason a graduate does not: the one-way workflow applies to hands as much as to vessels.
9. Change before touching anything that leaves the bench — a phone, a switch, a handle, the notebook. If you would not take the gloves off for it, do not touch it.
10. Change by steps 11 to 14 and put on a fresh pair. A single-use glove is not washed and put back on; it is nearly always contaminated inside the second time it is worn.

Taking it off

11. Rinse or wipe the gloves thoroughly with water while they are still on your hands. This is the step that makes the next three work.
12. Pinch the outside of the first glove at the wrist and peel it downwards so that it turns inside out, and hold it balled in the still-gloved hand.
13. Slide a bare finger inside the cuff of the remaining glove, touching only its inner surface, and peel that one down over the first, so that both end up inside out and one inside the other.
14. Both straight into the waste container at the designated place — not a pocket, not the bench, not a bin in the next room.
15. Apron off next, and eye protection last, with hands that are no longer gloved. Most contaminated to least, so that nothing clean is handled by something that is not.
16. Wash your hands before you leave the room, not when you remember. After contact with an alkaline solution such as a developer, follow the rinse with a pH-balanced cleanser: ordinary soap is itself alkaline.

How you know it worked

• Nothing was opened before the gloves were on.
• No bare skin touched the outside of a glove at any point in steps 11 to 14.
• Every glove that came off went into the waste, and none went back on.
• Nothing outside the wet bench was touched by a gloved hand.
• Hands washed, and the eye protection is where you will find it next time.

If a step fails

Step 2, the eye protection you own has no standard marked on it. It is a piece of plastic. Do the session as dry work, and buy from a supplier who states in words that the eyewear is for liquid splash. Prescription lenses need protection that incorporates the prescription, or is made to be worn over glasses.

Step 3, the caps are already off. Stop, put the equipment on, and note it. The habit fails quietly and always in the same direction, so the note is the only thing that fixes it.

Step 4, the box holds only a torn or perished pair. That is a restocking failure, and the same one that empties the spill kit. Do the session dry, and fix step 10 of the opening list first.

Step 6, you find a mark on a glove and cannot say when it arrived. Change the pair and treat the skin beneath it as exposed: rinse it. For silver nitrate in particular, the stain appears hours after the contact, so a visible mark means the change is overdue rather than due.

Step 9, you have already handled your phone in gloves. It is contaminated and it goes to your face. Change the gloves, clean the phone, and keep it off the bench.

Step 11, there is no water at the bench. Wipe them instead, on a disposable wipe that goes into the waste with them, and move the session to a bench with a sink. Removing an unrinsed glove is the one place in this procedure where the whole thing fails.

Recurring dry, red, cracked skin, or itchy blisters on fingers, hands or forearms. Not carelessness, and not treated by scrubbing harder. It is a control failure, usually at the point where the gloves come off. The first aid reference covers the delayed injuries; get medical advice.

What to record

Not every session — only the ones where something changed: a glove that failed, a splash found on a forearm, a pair re-used because the box was empty, a mark that appeared later. Those entries are the only measurement you will have of how the last control in the hierarchy is doing.