This will be the topic on 10pm new fox tonight.......captions states that c-diff and mrsa can live on scrubs. That being said.....what is your take on wearing scrubs out in public places????
When I leave work which is usually after midnite....i usually go straight home, but on occasion I have gone to a take out..
When we have a patient with c-diff or mrsa we usually wear precaution gown along with the standard precautions.
If I'm not visably soiled then I wear my scrubs out after work all the time. I observe standard precautions and thats good enough for me.
Plus, we're caring for these patients with nasty infections....where do you think most of them got them? Yep! Out in the environment and THEN they came to the hospital where I take care of them! Bacteria dont just spontaneously appear in healthcare facilities...they get brought there from other places and that same person who had them was probably picking through the fruits at the grocery store right next to Nancy Nurse in her scrubs a few weeks earlier!
There are nasty bacteria everywhere and the handle of the shopping cart and the money that we handle is just as gross as any hospital floor. Who do you think is cleaner...Joe Bob that went to take a crap in the grocery store bathroom and is now shopping for produce without washing his hands or the nurse in scrubs who was cleaning up c-diff poop all day and wore a gown and washed her hands about 50 times?
The media is the problem here. This is ridiculous just like all this swine flu crap. And look what happened...our ER's all full of people who think they've got the swine flu and we cant even take care of the people who actually need it!
I am willing to say something to a business that has people with scrubs shopping. I am not willing to be next in line for picking up what they dropped off and I will say so.
Sooo, you want the manager of the business to kick people out who are wearing scrubs? Really?
What about nurses in scrubs shopping on their way to work? What about the thousands of non-nurses and workers with no patient contact who wear scrubs to work, should we ban them too? What about me, as a school nurse. I cannot remember ever having my scrubs contaminated with bodily fluids, and I am dealing with a generally healthy population - should I be banned from businesses too? Give me a break! This is just hysteria. I would love to be the manager of the business who you choose to "say something to". I would laugh in your face, and probably suggest that if you don't like it you are free to take your business elsewhere.
people do not trust that nurses have common sense and knowledge of infection control? when did this start? i always have two sets of uniforms (since i'm moving from paramedic to nurse i'll say scrubs soon). the idea of wearing scrubs is if someone pukes or bleeds on your scrubs/ uniform, you do not ruin your street clothes. you just go change into your spare scrubs. i will be wearing solid toe white shoes so if blood, urine or whatever falls on my shoes i can wipe them clean with disinfectant.
so the true question should be... why does america not trust that we do not know what we are doing?
i always wash my hands after patient care, i never hold dirty linens against my body. if i were to stop off at the store after the only thing that would come in contact with anything would be my hands (which have been washed!)
either america does not understand that we know what we are doing or the board of nursing is handing out licenses to sub-standard nurses.
I am not looking up this stuff again, you can if you want, but if you check the government websites you will find that so many pounds of insect parts, feces, rat and roach feces are allowed in all of our dry foods. A LARGE amount of pus is left in the cow's milk that we give our kids everyday, and they also found that the dirtiest workers are day care workers (not very many wear scrubs). As nurses we need to do our own research. To say my very smart professor says blank, makes you sound stupid. All of my professors gave me a lot of their BS OPINIONS and they HATED it when I was able to prove them wrong!
Last week I think I sent home 7 people with either MRSA, c-diif, or VRE, these do not only exist in the hospital, to say that is crazy! Germs are everywhere and I am MUCH cleaner than those in the community. Healthcare workers and especially nurses are extremely careful about protecting themselves from these things-the public is not so careful! There was a post on here not so long ago, I don't remember who it was or the thread, but he was at the grocery store and a women who had a trach was inspecting the apples, covered her trach to talk, and them went back to inspecting the apples- yeah right nurses are the ONLY ones who could possibally be making us sick-I'll remember that when our crew of about 20 goes to our local watering hole in the morning all wearing scrubs, we'll drink to our filthy scrubs!
I would love for anyone to show me a link to the studies that show that our scrubs are making people sick. Like a few others have said, 90% of the doctors who round don't wear scrubs or PPE when checking on a patient. Neither does many other hospital staff.
But, like the media says (so it must be true) nurses are to stupid to understand the mechanisms of diseases and how they are spread, if nurses would just educate ourselves we could totally stamp out many community aquired illnesses-give me a break!
in the Uk scrubs are less common nurse wear however nurse style tunics are common from cleaners to AHP and comminuty NA and LTCF. My mate described the 'nurse' who took his x-ray as not being very gentle with his broken wrist, i'm sure the radiogarper likes to be considered a nurse. Even better my uni cleanars had tunics in staff nurse 'hospital blue'.
I wear my unifrorn in and cahnge wheni get home perhaps stoping at the supermarket but i hate that as it nears the hosptal and too easy to be indetifed as a nurse.
1) All these sources of contamination -- are people. With visitors. Now, who's more likely to spread MRSA -- me, who's in PPE like I'm treating Ebola, or the grandkid who crawls all over grandma, then goes with Mom and Dad to Shoney's and handles every handle on the food bar?
2) I don't roll around on my patient's bedding, wipe their noses and backsides bare handed, and then handled everything in the room barehanded. Their significant others do. Who then go to Walmart and touch merchandise, money, shopping carts, fruit, veggies....
On the whole, I think if you swabbed me and then swabbed the significant others of your average pt with infectious disease, I'm not the one who's going to light up the lab results...
I've already said my piece a couple of times (I'm with the scrubs-r-ok-at-the-store camp), but will add one thing. Young nurse moms pick up their babies and small children from day care on the way home from work; and greet them by picking them up and giving them a big hello kiss- and their kids are no sicker than anyone else's.
For that matter, staff members on maternity leave often bring their newborns to show off to their friends at work at the hospital (now that I'm not totally comfortable with), and the working nurses often rush to hold the new infant- and those kids don't seem to get any sicker than other kids either.
I use standard universal precautions and don't rub up against patients, dirty linens, etc. with my body/clothes. Other than that, I try not to think about ALL the ways we come into contact with germs that we can't control. For example, I choose not to wonder what the teenagers working in the fast food joints might be doing with the customers' food before it is served- I've heard stories from teens-
Whether or not it's a good idea to wear scrubs to the store, if we all stopped doing it today, I'd be willing to bet that it would not even make a ripple in the number of people who get sick! (and I'd just have that much more laundry to do!)
"...............When we have a patient with c-diff or mrsa we usually wear precaution gown along with the standard precautions".
Having been an Infection Control Nurse, I have to take exception to this practice! There are all too many times that deviations from accepted procedure have been initiated incorrectly, then taken as correct and followed by others. A hospital coud lose its accreditation through this type of thing!
Wearing a gown to do tasks other than those wherein a splash from an open wound or other body fluids is anticipated, it is incorrect. Possibly your infection control nurse will require an exception if a confused or noncompliant patient could leave deposits of MRSA, C diff, etc. in exudate with their infective organism where it could be live and picked up on scrubs/uniforms or equipment, wearing a gown is appropriate.
No on-the-spot decisions made by well meaning staff may be employed, other than those that exist in the current Infection Control Procedure Book.
Doctors.residents,medical students are immune to all germs do ya know? I love when they go into the isolation rooms,use their own stethoscope while leaning over the pt,their tie is laying on the pt and their coat is touching the bed. So they put their now contaminated stethoscope around their neck maybe wash their hands and walk out of the room and say when you ask them about PPE that they "didn't really touch the pt". :angryfire:banghead:
Then they go into the fresh post op's room check out the incision and wonder why a few days later that the incision is now purulent.
When you report occurrences like you did above, (naming names) TO THE INFECTION CONTROL NURSE at your facility, he/she will observe confidentiality and take cultures of the post op's purulent incision and any exudate the patient in isolation has. If/when the organisms match, that will be reported at the Infection Control Meeting, along with your (anonymous)report and a letter will be sent to the offending physician regarding his/her carelessness, and to the chief of medical staff.
I am seriously floored by how paranoid some people are. Stripping down in the garage? Separate loads of laundry? Keeping shoes outside? I *might* have germs on my shoes, but how often do I have my face on the floor where I've walked? My scrubs go in my regular laundry, my shoes go in the closet with the rest of my shoes. If I have to stop at the store after work, I stop at the store after work. I don't consider that NOT PROTECTING MY LOVED ONES. They are no less healthy on account of me than anyone else. Just like MRSA isn't a risk to us, with normal immune systems, it's not a risk if we "bring it home" (which I'm sorry, I just don't believe we do). We wear PPE to prevent from spreading it to other patients, who are in a compromised circumstance. If someone who is immunocompromised is out and about in the grocery store, the responsibility to protect themselves lies with THEM, and there are many more threats out there than anything my scrubs *might be carrying.*
:yeah:
CRBRNCPHT
13 Posts
If I'm not visably soiled then I wear my scrubs out after work all the time. I observe standard precautions and thats good enough for me.
Plus, we're caring for these patients with nasty infections....where do you think most of them got them? Yep! Out in the environment and THEN they came to the hospital where I take care of them! Bacteria dont just spontaneously appear in healthcare facilities...they get brought there from other places and that same person who had them was probably picking through the fruits at the grocery store right next to Nancy Nurse in her scrubs a few weeks earlier!
There are nasty bacteria everywhere and the handle of the shopping cart and the money that we handle is just as gross as any hospital floor. Who do you think is cleaner...Joe Bob that went to take a crap in the grocery store bathroom and is now shopping for produce without washing his hands or the nurse in scrubs who was cleaning up c-diff poop all day and wore a gown and washed her hands about 50 times?
The media is the problem here. This is ridiculous just like all this swine flu crap. And look what happened...our ER's all full of people who think they've got the swine flu and we cant even take care of the people who actually need it!