This Earth Day, Think About Your Gloves

Every year on April 22nd, Earth Day offers time to pause and reflect on the health of the planet. It’s an opportunity to consider your own footprint, your industry’s footprint, and what opportunities exist to improve them.

When most people think about reducing their impact on the environment, the focus tends to land on things like transportation, energy use, and plastic packaging. These are important, and they deserve the attention they receive. But industries like healthcare rarely make it into that conversation, and they probably should.

The Environmental Impact of Healthcare

Healthcare accounts for over 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, generating roughly 2 gigatons of carbon dioxide each year. To put that in perspective, if global healthcare were its own country, it would rank as the world’s fifth-largest emitter. 

According to the World Health Organization, an average university hospital generates approximately 1,634 tons of healthcare waste annually, and that number has been rising at a rate of 2 to 3% per year. These are huge numbers that illustrate that the healthcare industry is far from a passive bystander in the climate conversation.

There are many areas within healthcare where the environmental impact can be reduced or improved, from energy consumption to pharmaceutical disposal to supply chain management. But one issue that doesn’t get nearly enough attention is glove use. The overuse of disposable medical gloves is an ever-growing environmental problem. It also happens to be one that intersects directly with patient safety in a way worth examining further.

A Tool With a Real History, Now Overextended

Medical gloves have earned their place in healthcare. The introduction of gloves into medical practice dramatically reduced infections in clinical settings, and for procedures involving blood, body fluids, mucous membranes, or non-intact skin, they remain a necessary protective measure. Gloves, used correctly, save lives.

But over time, glove use has expanded beyond clinically indicated situations, into routine patient encounters where no meaningful exposure risk exists. 

To be clear, this pattern of overuse involves non-sterile examination gloves, the routine disposable gloves found in every hospital room and hallway; this does not apply to sterile gloves, which are used for invasive procedures like surgery, central line placement, and catheter insertion.

If the excessive use of non-sterile gloves was truly preventing more infections, that might be a trade-off worth considering. However, that’s not what the evidence shows. The WHO has stated clearly that using gloves when they are not indicated does not necessarily reduce the transmission of pathogens. Thus, in those instances, the extra waste offers no corresponding safety benefit.

The Pandemic Effect

Perhaps not surprisingly, the overuse of non-sterile gloves accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. In England alone, glove usage in healthcare more than tripled during the pandemic, jumping from roughly 1.8 billion gloves used in 2019 to over 5.4 billion in 2020. In many cases, those emergency-era policies normalized universal gloving practices that had never been part of standard precautions.

It’s understandable that training, policies, and behaviors from that period have lingered. The pandemic was an unprecedented time, and erring on the side of caution made sense in a moment of uncertainty. But now six years on from the start of the pandemic, it’s worth revisiting what appropriate glove use actually looks like, based on evidence rather than precaution.

Gloves Are Not a Replacement for Clean Hands

Gloves give the false impression of providing a reliable, impermeable barrier. However, in reality, gloves can become contaminated just as easily as bare hands through patient contact, environmental surfaces, or improper donning and doffing. This means that wearing gloves does not eliminate the need for hand hygiene, and using them as a substitute can actually increase the risk of pathogen transmission when they are worn across multiple interactions without being changed.

So, when should gloves actually be worn? The WHO recommends gloves in these situations:

• When anticipating contact with blood or body fluids
• If touching mucous membranes or non-intact skin
• When handling contaminated items or surfaces
• When performing vascular access procedures
• If the patient has a known or suspected infection requiring contact precautions

Conversely, the WHO does NOT recommend the use of gloves when:

• Taking a patient’s blood pressure or pulse
• Administering intramuscular or subcutaneous injections (unless blood contact is anticipated)
• Transporting patients
• Distributing oral medications
• Touching intact skin
• Handling food, paperwork, or equipment not associated with a contaminated procedure

Wearing gloves for these low-risk activities generates waste without reducing infections. However, it’s worth noting that skipping gloves does not mean skipping infection prevention entirely, and that hand hygiene before and after every patient encounter remains non-negotiable.

Hand Hygiene is the Cornerstone

Since the transmission of pathogens in healthcare is driven primarily by contact, hand hygiene remains the most effective tool available for reducing infections for both patients and healthcare workers.

The WHO’s 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene outline exactly when that must occur: before touching a patient, before a clean or aseptic procedure, after exposure to body fluids, after touching a patient, and after touching the patient’s surroundings. These moments apply at every patient interaction, from the most complex procedure to the most routine task, and they apply whether or not gloves are worn.

Better Care, Less Waste

Electronic hand hygiene monitoring systems like SwipeSense can play a useful role in reducing unnecessary glove use. When clinicians consistently perform hand hygiene at the right moments, gloves are less likely to be used as a stand-in for clean hands and are more likely to be reserved for the situations that actually call for them. In addition, real-time compliance data, voice reminders, and unit-level feedback keep hand hygiene front of mind in ways that also reinforce appropriate glove use.

Earth Day is a useful reflection point to consider the use (or misuse) of resources in healthcare. Reducing unnecessary glove use is about directing resources toward interventions rooted in evidence rather than assumptions or habits.

Consistent hand hygiene, paired with the appropriate use of gloves, provides better protection for patients and generates less waste than reflexive, wasteful alternatives. That is a meaningful win for patient safety, operational efficiency, and the environment.