I’ve gone from psych where I touched a patients only on very bad days, and thus washed my hands 4 or 5 times per working day, to Emergency Medicine, where I see a new patient every 5 minutes and wash my hands or use alcohol gel approximately 3000 times a day.
I’m trying to cut down on soap and water and use the gel as much as possible, and I use the hospital provided moisturiser (yuck) every 3 or 4 washes. It’s not helping. I’m using hand cream like it is going out of fashion at home too, but my hands are still unhappy.
There are silicon moisturizers that last better through a handwashing. I also use vaseline on my hands at night when it gets really dry here - that helps when you start the day with moisturized hands. The reality is that you pretty much just have to wash and moisturize hundreds of times a day. Get a really good moisturizer (one with silicon in it).
Hemp lotion from the Body Shop worked for one of my coworkers who would get terribly dry, cracked skin - her knuckles would split in the winter. I bought her some hemp lotion on a whim when I was browsing around the store. It seemed to help her. We work in animal health care, and have the same hand-washing protocols as the human side of health care.
I’ve only been lucky with it because I have super-oily skin and “sweaty” hands. All the hand washing makes my hands normal, it’s almost a benefit! But I feel badly for all the already-normal folks who have to wash their hands 200-300 times a day, it seems like it’s kind of dangerous in a way because all the skin damage gives pathogens and entrance! Not so much a worry when dealing with animals that are sick, but human illnesses terrify me.
Hope you find a good solution, and thanks for having the guts to take care of other people!
During the Dickens Christmas Fair, I’m working in a kitchen washing tea pots and dishes, so my hands are in dishwater for hours at a time. Hot soapy water is bad enough, but the hyper-chlorinated sanitizing rinse really beats up your skin. Hemp’s the only thing I’ve found that keeps the skin on my hands from cracking and falling off.
The smell may take some getting used to - it’s definitely not a girly-girl perfumed product! (I’m a guy, so I appreciate that in addition to how well it works!)
You have to wash your hands before and after putting on gloves and you have to have clean hands before you see each patient.
So, I’ll wash my hands, examine a patient, wash my hands and put on sterile gloves to sew up their cut, wash my hands, see the next patient etc. Seriously, it’s a lot of handwashing and alcohol gel.
Adding Hemp to the scent of alcohol might cause some awkward questions :p, but it might be worth a go!
Corn Huskers Lotion is great. Use just a little bit and it doesn’t leave your hands greasy, but it will take care of the dryness. When my sister went through a patch on her job where she was washing her hands very frequently (and she couldn’t use any kind of lotion that didn’t instantly absorb because she couldn’t have her hands be greasy), I gave her a bottle of this and it worked wonders.
I don’t know if you can get it in Ireland, but it’s seriously good stuff for a pretty low price.
Hemp doesn’t smell like marijuana, but it is an awesome moisturizer! It’s what I used when WhyBaby was in the NICU and I had to scrub (Not surgery scrub, but scrub for 3 minutes with those disposable brushes with the soap/Betadyne built in) twice a day and wash my hands only slightly less often than the nurses. Hempz is my favorite brand, followed by Drench, but I don’t know if they’re available on your side of the pond.
Rose Hip Seed oil is also an amazing and gentle oil that has excellent skin absorption and helps reduce redness and irritation. Adding a few drops of it to any moisturizer could help. If you can get essential oils, chamomile and lavender (not lavendin! Lavendin is irritating!) are also nice for healing damaged skin. I like to add them to unscented lotion that I buy at the store ('cause making lotion from scratch, while certainly possible, is a little tricky).
Is the gel really less drying than the detergent in the “soap”? I’d expect the alcohol in the gel to exacerbate your symptoms.
Corn Husker’s Lotion is good, but if your skin is already broken it really stings. I second freckafree’s suggestion to goop on a good bland moisturizer and sleep in cotton gloves. I used Paul Mitchell’s The Conditioner; yep, it’s hair conditioner.
I’ve had the same problem many times, always after being away from and then returning to an intensive-handwashing regimen. For myself, I found that over time my hands would toughen up and the knuckles would stop splitting and bleeding. Until the next time I spent a month at a desk and then the whole process would have to start over.
Another vote for Cornhusker lotion. When I worked in the santiation crew at a warehouse, I used it and at night I would apply Vit E oil on broken skin (yes, E oil is oily but it works!) directly to heal faster.
Eucerin paste, sold in a tub shaped container, is the best. The Walgreen’s brand knock off is very good, also. My coworkers beg me for a blob of it regularly.
It’s thick, so I apply it to the backs of my hands and fingertips, mosyly.
I would recommend Cerave cream during the day and Auaphor Healing Ointment at night and/or new prescription cream Tetrix, which is for dermatitis. Really there are a lot of products that would help. The key, though, is to apply the cream or lotion every time you wash your hands, while they’re still damp.
When I work in food service I have this problem. I have very sensitive skin, so the frequent washings plus someone always throwing bleach in the dishwater would have my knuckles cracked (and oozing - ew! not appetizing in the least!) and the other skin red and raw.
I tried Cornhusker’s Lotion, and it is great for fast absorbency and moisture, but This’ll Do is right that it stings like the dickens if your skin’s already broken. A&D ointment with cotton gloves at night helped to heal most of the worst. Gold Bond Ultimate Healing lotion really worked well to maintain, and my favorite lotion that didn’t leave my hands greasy was Sally Hansen 18 Hour Protective Cream. Again, not sure what’s available there, but if you spot either of those, I’d say it’s worth a try.
Although I have yet to ‘enjoy’ healthcare hands, I know several people who have. The lady I know with the worst case uses silicon barrier creme (mentioned upthread) with mesh-like cotton pregloves and then powder free latex or nitrile gloves. She also used an abbreviated handwashing technique: she didn’t wash the backs of her hands very much. Although this is not recommended technique, I can see her point. What’s worse, not really washing the areas of her hand least likely to come into contact with a patient, or having open sores on the backs of her hands? It’s a conundrum! Good luck!
As irishgirl explained, wearing sanitary gloves is not exactly as portrayed on television (where they put on a pair and leave them on for the rest of their shift, practically eating lunch with them on).
The best I’ve ever tried was Udder Cream. I started using it after the trauma department got the best of my hands. After I got them back to normal, I started using the lotion instead of the cream. Good stuff!
To be honest, I wear gloves less often than I could do, because I have teeny tiny hands (size 5, XS), so it’s actually safer for me to do blood draws and cannulation without gloves than to try and do it with and inch of glove waving freely at the end of my fingers. I have used up the department’s supply of XS gloves.
Luckily my department stocks sterile gloves in a 5.5, so I can do suturing more safely, but apparently size 5 gloves are like gold dust and I’m waiting for the XS non sterile gloves to be delivered.
I think I’ll have to try out some stuff and see what works best for me.
