Ease of donning commercially available powder-free surgical gloves.

There are a wide variety of powder-free gloves that can now be used by surgeons. The purpose of this study was to quantify the forces required to don these powder-free surgical gloves. The lowest donning forces for wet hands was encountered with powder-free gloves coated with a hydrogel polymer. In addition, the hydrogel coated gloves exhibited the least increase in donning forces from dry hands to wet hands. While greater forces were encountered with the other commercially available powder-free gloves than the hydrogel coated gloves, they all could be safely donned on dry hands without tearing.