best way to present the options to the medical staff, who don't neces-
sarily have the time to assess glove options beyond comfort and per-
formance in the OR.
Once you identify a few synthetic glove options, ask the companies
to provide samples so that you can conduct a trial that gives surgeons
and OR staff a sense of how the gloves feel during actual cases. Have
manufacturer reps present a 5-minute overview of the glove options
and provide a box of gloves to each individual on the purchasing com-
mittee. The purchasing department head can then collect critiques
from the committee members before trialing the gloves that garner
the most positive feedback.
There is no magic length of time for how long an effective glove trial
should last. At Hopkins, we surveyed physicians for several weeks.
Manufacturer reps were present and provided gloves to the surgeons.
It ultimately came down to the heads of supply purchasing and the
medical staff to decide on which glove to stock once they got feed-
back from the surgeons and rest of the OR team about the real-life
performance of the gloves. OSM
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S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 5 | O U T P A T I E N T S U R G E R Y . N E T
Dr. Hamilton (rhamilto@jhmi.edu) is a professor of pathology and medicine at Johns Hopkins
University School of Medicine and director of the Johns Hopkins Dermatology, Allergy and
Clinical Immunology Reference Laboratory in Baltimore, Md.
