Hospital hygiene

The fifth entry is a desinfeção das mãos, and the noun inside it has grown a family of adjectives in English that Portuguese cannot copy. From the plain word « hand » we have built « hands-on », « hands-off » and « hands-free », three compounds that describe no hands at all but a manner of working. A « hands-on » manager does the job instead of watching it, « hands-on training » is training in which the learner touches the equipment, and in a hospital « hands-on care » names precisely the moment at which the protocol asks for the alcohol rub — before the patient is touched and after. « Hands-off » is the opposite stance, the decision not to intervene: « a hands-off approach », « the regulator stayed hands-off ». « Hands-free » went to the car and means only that nothing is being held. Portuguese has no such series and must change word each time: prático for the training, o contacto direto for the care, sem intervir for the stance, and mãos-livres for the telephone alone. Fix « hands-on » and « hands-off » as one idiom rather than as two words, because the hyphen carries the whole of the meaning and the plural never becomes singular.