How often do surgical gloves fail? The picture (cc) is by A.Currell
Even though minor rifts in surgical gloves happen every now and then most surgeons don’t think too much about them. A study by Carter et al. indicate that we probably should be more worried: we miss to detect about 2/3 of the perforations. In 80 % of the cases we also failed to acknowledge that also the inner glove was perforated. Not surprisingly the surgeon had the highest rate of perforations, between 4-9 %, relating to procedure difficulty. Continue reading
