Hand washing and prosthetic fingers
I have a rather unusual situation I need help on. We are a low risk dry powder food manufacturing facility. While doing a GMP audit, I noticed an employee wearing a leather batters glove on his hand. I questioned him and it turns out he has 3 prosthetic fingers on his hand. He is involved in the blending process at our facility. I told him it was a GMP violation wearing the glove that proper hand washing procedures could not be performed, which stirred up a stink. He explained he wears the glove to protect his prosthetics and was told as long as he wore a nitrile glove over his glove and followed hand washing with his covered gloved hand, it was acceptable. HR said we had to be careful due to the American Disabilities Act. Any thoughts?
Hi there.
My question would be how can he assure his haands are clean before putting them in the gloves? If he washes his gloves with only soap it would be nice to have a disinfectant.
Also important to check the specs for his gloves (materials involved and regular checkups in case there's any missing pieces).
Remember if you will treat it as an exception to include it in your GMP program.
My two cents. :shades:
Dear Regina,
I would accept the exception with the justification that the person is wearing nitril glove over his own glove and respect the hand washing and disinfection procedures.
However I wonder:
- if he was wearing a nitril glove, how were you be able to detect the black leather glove?
- due to wearing glove underneath and having prosthetic fingers, this person might not be able to feel that the nitril glove is damaged
I have a rather unusual situation I need help on. We are a low risk dry powder food manufacturing facility. While doing a GMP audit, I noticed an employee wearing a leather batters glove on his hand. I questioned him and it turns out he has 3 prosthetic fingers on his hand. He is involved in the blending process at our facility. I told him it was a GMP violation wearing the glove that proper hand washing procedures could not be performed, which stirred up a stink. He explained he wears the glove to protect his prosthetics and was told as long as he wore a nitrile glove over his glove and followed hand washing with his covered gloved hand, it was acceptable. HR said we had to be careful due to the American Disabilities Act. Any thoughts?
Hi, I would put it to a US disability organisation or equivilent and get advice. Atleast you can show you are willing to work with them and on the selfish side, its good rep for the site. If you have an ATP system you may be able to prove how clean it is and as said above you want to get a spec on the prostetic just in case it has something missing or contains something nasty. You may have to have a procedure on cleaning it, checking it and the nitril glove for rips and what actions to take if its found something is missing etc. Do a risk assessment also and ultimately work with the person to keep them in a job as its probably not their fault they have an issue, atleast he/she is trying rather than sitting on their hands doing nothing at home