As we warm up for world hand hygiene day tomorrow, it’s a good time to have a talk about gloves. I challenge you to go onto a hospital ward and time how long it takes before you see some questionable glove practice. It won’t be long before you see somebody coming out of a room used by a patient on some transmission based precautions with gloves on. Or somebody commuting around the ward with gloves on. Or somebody putting gloves on in preparation for patient care who can’t quite articulate why. So, as many of us launch new patient care pathways in the next phase of the pandemic, and as the national IPC manual has just been published in England, it’s a really good time to talk about when we don’t need to use gloves, which is most of the time!