Infection Control at the Bedside
Apply Standard Precautions and PPE in a setting where you have sustained, close physical contact with patients.
By the end of this lesson you can
- Apply Standard Precautions in direct care
- Don and doff PPE in the correct sequence
- Apply transmission-based precautions correctly
- Prevent transmission during personal care tasks
Lesson Notes
Read through the key concepts before you try the challenge.
Working through a bed bath without cross-contaminating
Where the gloves change during personal care
Give a bed bath to a patient who also has a wound dressing that needs checking, without carrying organisms from one task to the next.
- 1
Hand hygiene, then gloves, before you touch the patient at all.
The first moment is before contact, not after. Gloves put on over unwashed hands carry whatever was on them into the task, and the glove gives you no protection from something you brought in yourself.
- 2
Work clean to dirty, top to bottom, and change gloves when you cross that line.
Wash the face and upper body before the perineal area, never the reverse. This is the single ordering rule that prevents most cross-contamination during personal care, and it costs nothing to follow.
- 3
After perineal care: remove gloves, perform hand hygiene, put on fresh gloves.
All three steps, in that order. Changing gloves without hand hygiene between is the common shortcut and it defeats the purpose — hands are contaminated during removal regardless of technique.
- 4
Only now approach the wound dressing.
Moving from a dirty task to an open wound on the same patient is a direct route to infection. The fact that it is the same person is irrelevant — organisms from the perineum do not belong in a wound.
- 5
Remove gloves and perform hand hygiene before touching the bed rails, the call light, or the chart.
Everything you touch after care becomes a surface the next person touches. This is how an organism leaves the room, and it is the step most often skipped because the task feels finished.
Result: One patient, one bath, one wound check, and nothing carried between them.
Clean to dirty, and remove-hygiene-reglove as a single unit every time you cross the line.
Proximity raises the stakes
You provide direct care on a medical unit at Lakeside Regional.
Over a shift you bathe patients, assist with toileting, reposition people, change linens, and collect specimens. Every one of those involves close contact with body fluids. Nobody in the building has more opportunities to transmit an organism from one patient to another than you do.
Your task: Build infection control habits robust enough to survive a twelve-hour shift under time pressure.
Standard Precautions apply to every patient in every encounter: blood, all body fluids except sweat, non-intact skin, and mucous membranes are treated as potentially infectious. In direct care this is not an abstraction — it governs most of what you do all day.
| Moment | Example |
|---|---|
| Before touching a patient | Before helping someone reposition |
| Before a clean or aseptic procedure | Before catheter care |
| After body fluid exposure risk | After assisting with toileting |
| After touching a patient | After a bed bath |
| After touching patient surroundings | After changing linens or adjusting a bed rail |
| Put on | Take off |
|---|---|
| 1. Gown | 1. Gloves |
| 2. Mask or respirator | 2. Eye protection |
| 3. Eye protection | 3. Gown |
| 4. Gloves over gown cuffs | 4. Mask or respirator, outside the room |
| Type | PPE | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Contact | Gown and gloves; dedicated equipment | C. difficile, MRSA, scabies |
| Droplet | Surgical mask; mask the patient during transport | Influenza, pertussis |
| Airborne | Fit-tested N95 or higher; negative-pressure room | Tuberculosis, measles, varicella |
You have just finished perineal care and now need to apply a dressing to a wound on the same patient. What should you do?
Challenge
Apply what you've learned in this lesson.
Infection control technique is a psychomotor skill requiring supervised practice.
- Write both PPE sequences from memory, then check against the CDC poster.
- For a complete bed bath, list every point at which gloves should change and hand hygiene should occur.
- For each, state the precautions required: suspected tuberculosis; C. difficile; influenza; MRSA in a wound.
- Explain in three sentences why dedicated equipment is required under contact precautions.
Finished this lesson?
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