Before committing to your glove type, it is well worth considering a few more elements that can substantially affect how safe you actually are in your work environment, elements such as the type and duration of any potentially harmful contact.

• Will gloves be worn for a short or intermittent period of time, or longer periods? Comfort is more important for longer wear. Generally, thicker, robust gloves offer greater protection than thinner gloves but thinner gloves offer better dexterity.

• Will contact be from occasional splashes or by total immersion? Short gloves are fine to protect against splashes. If hands are immersed choose a length greater than the depth of immersion.

Do you simply need to protect the hands themselves or is there a need to protect the wrists and even part of the arm? Length of glove is as important to the assessment of the correct glove as any other factor.

Where gloved hand immersion is justified as necessary in a risk assessment, one way to improve glove use and prevent the spread of contamination is to reduce the immersion depth of the hands. In addition, it is important to establish cuff length requirements. The glove cuff must exceed the immersion depth or handling area by a good margin. If the ‘spare’ cuff is too short, chemicals can splash backwards onto the sleeves or skin. This spare cuff is also used as a safe handling area to remove and replace the gloves.

No matter how long the cuff, if there is a need to raise the hand and liquids can run down the glove and onto the arm, the first priority should be to look for alternative ways to accomplish the job. One way to reduce the problem, where a small amount of run-off is expected, is to fold back the cuff to form a drip catcher. This effectively makes the glove shorter, so the cuff length should be increased to allow for the fold back to maintain the splash back length of cuff.