Incidence of surgical gloves perforation in abdominal surgery

Abstract

Surgical gloves are used to prevent the transmission of micro-organisms from the surgeon’s hands to the patient and vice versa. However, it has been reported that glove perforation frequently occurred during conventional open surgeries. Although laparoscopic surgery has become widespread, few studies have addressed glove perforation in laparoscopic surgery. In this study, we investigated the incidence of surgical gloves perforation in both types of surgical approach. We investigated the incidence of perforation in 3,026 gloves (1,513 pairs) used during the gastrointestinal surgeries and found that the overall perforation rate was 10.9％. There was no significant difference between open surgery and laparoscopic surgery (11.3％ and 10.4％, respectively, P＝0.4611). When double gloves were used, the perforation rate of inner gloves (5.7％) was significantly less frequent compared to the outer gloves （5.7％ and 11.9％, respectively, P＝0.0001）. The current data demonstrated that glove perforation during laparoscopic surgery occurred at the almost same rate as open surgery, suggesting that double gloves may be useful for preventing the blood exposure and SSI in laparoscopic surgery.