Washing your hands at home is a problem you can solve once. Doing it at a friend's house, at the gym, or in a hotel is a different problem, and much less is written about it.
The short answer.
Carry something small. Soap sheets weigh nothing. A foam sanitiser needs far less push than a liquid one. A small pump bottle you know you can work beats whatever is on the basin.
And public dispensers are often easier than the one at your friend's house, because a wall unit usually has a long lever you can press with a forearm.
Why away from home is its own problem
At home you can change things. Move the bottle to the corner. Buy the brand with the easier pump. Fit something to the basin.
Away from home you get whatever is there. Usually that is a small supermarket pump on a friend's basin — the exact thing that was hard at home before you changed it.
And there is the other part, which is not about hands at all. Asking someone to help you wash your hands, in their bathroom, at a dinner party, is a thing most people would rather avoid. So they plan around it, or go without, or wait. That is worth solving.
Things worth carrying
Roughly smallest first. Most of these are not ours.
Soap sheets
Little dissolving leaves of soap in a flat tin, the size of a card. You take one out and wet it. No pressing at all.
They weigh almost nothing, cost very little, and are sold in most chemists and outdoor shops. If pressing is the problem, this removes pressing. It is the first thing to try.
The catch: you need one hand able to pick a thin sheet out of a tin, which is its own kind of fiddly.
A foam sanitiser
Foam needs noticeably less push than gel or liquid, for the same reason a foaming hand wash does at home. A small bottle in a bag covers most of the times you would otherwise be stuck.
Not a replacement for washing when hands are actually dirty. Good for the rest of the time.
A small pump bottle you know you can work
Fill a small travel bottle from the hand wash you already manage at home. You have then taken the known-good pump with you rather than trusting whatever is on the basin.
Refilling it is a job at home, on your own terms, rather than a surprise in someone else's bathroom.
A bar of soap in a tin
Old fashioned and it still works. No pump, no push, nothing to fail. A bar needs gripping and turning, so whether it suits you depends on which movement is the difficult one.
A clip-on pump adapter
This one is ours, so read it with that in mind.
PALM is a disc 62 mm across and 10.5 mm thick — 16.5 mm for the Dome. About the size of a drinks coaster, and about 16 grams. It clips onto a pump top in a couple of seconds and comes off the same way, so it goes in a wash bag and clips onto whatever bottle is at the other end — a friend's, a hotel's, the one in the gym changing room.
That is the honest difference from everything else in the comparison: the other options are furniture. A wall dispenser is screwed to a wall. An electric one and an easy-press bottle both mean carrying the unit and the liquid in it.
It also moves between bottles, so the same one covers your kitchen, your bathroom and wherever you are staying.
And it is discreet, which matters more in someone else's bathroom than in your own. You are not unpacking a dispenser on their basin or explaining what it is. You clip a small disc onto their bottle, wash your hands, and take it away again.
The limit, plainly: it only clips onto pump tops in its size range, and you cannot know in advance what is on somebody else's basin. It might not fit. Soap sheets always work.
What you will actually meet out there
Worth knowing, because it is not what people expect.
- Public toilets, hotels and gyms usually have wall dispensers with a long lever. These are often easier than anything at home — the bottle cannot slide away because it is bolted to the wall, and the arm is long, so a forearm or an elbow does the job. Good news, and rarely mentioned.
- Airport and motorway toilets increasingly have sensor dispensers. No pressing at all. Put a hand underneath.
- Friends' and family's bathrooms are the hard ones. Small supermarket pumps, on a slippery basin, with nothing to brace against.
- Restaurant toilets vary more than anywhere. Some have levers, some have small bottles balanced on a shelf.
So the thing to prepare for is not the hotel. It is your sister's bathroom.
Asking, without making it a thing
Sometimes the simplest fix is a sentence, and people find that the hardest part.
What tends to work is asking for a thing rather than for help. “Have you got a bar of soap?” is an easy question to answer and puts nobody on the spot. So is “could you leave the top off for me?”
Nobody minds. It is the asking that feels large, not the answering.
Where none of this helps
If you have no useful hand function at all, most of this page is not for you. Sheets need picking up. A bar needs gripping. A disc still needs pressing.
What does work in that case is what is already on the wall in most public buildings: lever dispensers and sensor taps, worked with a forearm or with nothing at all. Away from home may genuinely be easier than home, and it is worth knowing which places near you are.
An occupational therapist can also look at this as a specific problem rather than a general one. It is exactly the sort of thing they are good at.
Where to get proper help, most of it free
Nothing on this website is a substitute for any of the following, and all of it is better than a website.
- A pharmacist. No appointment, no referral, and they will talk to you about hand pain and about what is worth trying. The most under-used free advice in the country.
- Your GP. Particularly if the difficulty is new, getting worse, worse in the morning, or in both hands at once.
- An occupational therapist. This is the profession whose actual job is the problem this page is about — they look at your hands and your kitchen, not at a category page. In England you can ask your council for a needs assessment for equipment and adaptations, and much of what they recommend is provided at no cost. Ask your GP, or your council's adult social care team directly.
- Arthritis UK — the charity that was Versus Arthritis until its 2026 rebrand — and NRAS both run free helplines staffed by people who know this subject properly.
- Living Made Easy, run by the Disabled Living Foundation, is an impartial database of daily-living equipment. It lists products from everyone, including our competitors and including things that would replace PALM entirely. If you want to compare options without being sold to, start there.
PALM is a daily-living aid, not a medical device. It makes a soap pump easier to press. It does not treat, prevent or improve any condition, and nothing here is medical advice or a diagnosis. If your hands hurt, the people in the list above are the ones to ask.