Does Gloved Medical Personnel Scratch Less Often?

Unconscious touching of a person's own head or neck (for example by scratching) is a frequently observed and completely normal physiological movement pattern in humans, which when done by medical personnel attending a patient poses a high risk of unconscious self-contamination, even of an already disinfected hand, and of subsequent contamination of the patient. However, as compared to an ungloved hand, a gloved hand is felt to be "foreign," which could reduce the frequency of self-contact and thus the contamination rate.

Wearing protective gloves is highly recommended in medical practice. The purpose of this study is to explore how wearing, or not wearing, protective gloves affects

• the frequency of unconscious self-contact
• contamination of the gloved/ungloved hand