Buyer's Guides
Training people to use PPE does not help much if the box is in another room. Compliance is usually a placement problem wearing a training problem's clothes.
OMS Clinical Team
Product Specialists
Dispensers look like the least interesting thing you can buy. They are also, more often than not, what decides whether the protocol on the wall is the protocol in the room.
If gloves are in a cupboard, someone will do the quick job without them. If the hand rub is by the door rather than by the chair, it gets used on the way in and not between patients. None of that is a knowledge problem, and no amount of retraining fixes it.
This is not just a supplier's opinion. The World Health Organization's multimodal hand hygiene improvement strategy treats making alcohol-based handrub available at the point of care as system change, and the point of care means where the patient is, not where the sink is.
The literature makes the same point from the other direction: training staff to recognise hand hygiene opportunities may not improve adherence where the dispensers or sinks are not easily accessible in the workflow, or are not working. If you have run the training and the audit has not moved, the next thing to look at is where the dispensers are.
The same logic applies to gloves, aprons and the bin the used ones go into. Every extra step between the task and the item is a step somebody skips when a room is busy.
A glove box dispenser holds the box open, keeps it off a contaminated surface and stops it being knocked to the floor. Single, double and triple holders exist because most rooms need more than one size available at once, and the commonest failure is having only mediums on the wall so anyone with larger or smaller hands goes to the cupboard or makes do.
Site them where the gloves are put on, which is usually near the couch or the chair rather than by the door. Wall mounting is better than a shelf: a box on a worktop ends up next to whatever else is on that worktop.
Aprons come on a roll or flat packed, and the dispenser has to match. Roll dispensers dispense one at a time and stop the roll unspooling across the floor. Flat pack dispensers suit boxed aprons and take less depth.
The item worth pairing them with is a sack holder or a combined apron and sack dispenser. An apron comes off at the end of a task and has to go somewhere immediately. If the somewhere is across the room, it goes on a surface first, which is the moment cross-contamination happens. Putting the disposal point next to the donning point is a small change that removes the problem.
An elbow-operated dispenser exists for a specific reason. You are usually operating it with hands that are contaminated, so a push button gets contaminated too, and the next person touches it before they have washed. An elbow or forearm lever breaks that chain.
Stainless steel is worth the difference where it will be cleaned repeatedly with a disinfectant, since some plastics craze over time under the products an infection control policy specifies. Plastic is fine in lower-traffic areas and costs less.
Mask dispensers matter most where masks are used intermittently, because a box left open on a side gets handled by everybody and the contents stop being clean. Wipe dispensers keep the pack sealed between uses, which matters more than it sounds: an alcohol wipe left open dries out, and a dry wipe does nothing.
Couch roll and hygiene roll holders are the most mundane item here and the one most often improvised. A roll on a windowsill unspools onto the floor and gets thrown away. A holder at the head of the couch is a few pounds and stops that happening several times a week.
Not every setting can drill. Rented premises, listed buildings, domiciliary rounds and rooms that change use all need PPE at the point of care without a fixed fitting.
A mobile PPE organiser or trolley solves it by bringing the dispensers to the task rather than the other way round. The thing to check is that it is stable when loaded and that the wheels lock, because a trolley that rolls when leaned on is worse than a shelf. For domiciliary work a carry caddy does the same job at a smaller scale.
Dispensers get cleaned as often as the surfaces around them, so check the material against the products in your own infection control policy rather than assuming. Some disinfectants degrade some plastics over time, and a crazed dispenser holds dirt in the cracks and has to be replaced anyway.
Stainless steel handles repeated disinfection well and costs more. Plastic is lighter, cheaper and easier to mount on plasterboard. Both are fine choices; the wrong choice is a material nobody checked against the cleaning regime.
Dispensers, holders and organisers are stocked in our disposables and PPE range.
From our catalogue
Delivery as soon as Tuesday 15 September
Inc. VAT
Delivery as soon as Tuesday 15 September
Inc. VAT
Delivery as soon as Tuesday 15 September
Inc. VAT
Delivery as soon as Tuesday 15 September
Inc. VAT
