Sadly, studies show that nearly 30 percent of health care workers don’t comply. I can understand why such measures are hard to enforce, because isolation precautions create a barrier between patients and their caregivers.

At times, patients in isolation reach out to shake or hold my hand before I’ve put my gloves on. Sometimes I allow myself to touch patients without gloves, partly because the separation makes me feel I am shunning them, as if the hospital were an ancient leper colony.

And isolation barriers can be dangerous for patients. Two studies showed that doctors and nurses were half as likely to enter the rooms of or to examine patients on contact precautions. One study has even shown that patients in isolation have significantly more preventable adverse events, get less care and are more dissatisfied with their treatment than other patients.

Unlike other treatment, contact isolation does not benefit the patient in isolation; rather, it benefits other hospitalized patients and the community. Our goal is to contain the spread of the resistant organism from one patient to another, through health care workers. But family members, who are also subject to the same glove-and-gown requirements, are not nearly as likely to spread the organisms to other patients. In fact, there are no formal, enforceable recommendations for family members.

In the end, I believe, it is contact precaution and prudent use of antibiotics  and not new antibiotics or advanced technologies  that will save us from multidrug-resistant organisms. So the best I can do is to provide a long explanation to the patient and family, and hope they will comply, within reason. This is exactly what I did.

“Last night,” I told my patient, “the lab had called and said that your urine culture was showing a resistant organism. To make sure the organism does not spread to other patients through health care workers, we need to have people wear gloves and gown.”

But in this case, I also took some liberty with hospital policy; after all, the isolation recommendations are murky when it comes to family members. I said, “It is O.K. for him to kiss you.”

“Now you can kiss me,” my patient told her husband. With me standing just a few feet away, he hesitated for a second. And as his yellow gown draped over her and his green gloves held her shoulders, he gave her a long wedding kiss. I felt like a yellow-gowned chaplain who had just remarried a couple.