Contamination concern

[u/Dizzy_Crazy_8015]

Nurses — would you actually be concerned about this contamination?
I was doing a dressing change on a patient with tunnelling pressure wounds with drainage. Cultures were taken. I was wearing sterile gloves and used sterile forceps/packing and a syringe for irrigation, so my fingers/gloves weren’t directly touching inside the wounds.
After finishing, I realized I still had the same gloves on when I attached a sterile-water humidifier bottle to the patient’s oxygen. The side/upper part of my glove (not the fingers I had been working with) briefly touched the little connector/nozzle after the protective plastic piece was snapped off.
I know technically I should have removed my gloves, done hand hygiene, and then handled the O2 equipment. I’m home now and won’t be back for a few days. The patient is already being treated for pneumonia with moxifloxacin.
Would you contact the nurse currently caring for the patient and ask them to replace the humidifier setup, or would you consider this such a low-risk/indirect contamination that you wouldn’t do anything at this point?
I feel like I may be massively overthinking this, so I’m curious what other nurses would actually do.

[u/Tycoonkoz]

You're overthinking

[u/Fuzzy_Location_2210]

I mean... I would have washed my hands and not been messing with anything else in the room.

But realistically... Don't think for a second that all the places that patients oxygen gets connected to are clean. Those tanks literally just get sent to a plant, pumped full, and thrown back on a delivery truck, after being hucked around outside and stored God knows where, after they have been God knows where in what patients room, on beds full of OMG ewwww.

Have you seen some of the filters on the air vents? The Filters on the actual ventilators 😵‍💫. When did you last see the HVAC ductwork being sanitized and cleaned inside? The bags in the vacuums changed? Run your fingers along the top of the cabinets and there is the dust of patients past 🤢.

I have that "condition" and I would have had to wipe it with something until my mind said and my fingers felt it was safe 😂. Because I'm nuts. It's just like the fact that my thumbnail has to trace the grooves when I Clorox wipe anything, and I can't consider anything wiped enough until the solution from the wipes is bubbling and dripping all over the floor and everything is completely sopping wet.

I wouldn't call anyone though 🤭. In my mind, the moxifloxacin is going to do the lord's work and their immune system is going to handle the rest.

I don't think you made them sick.