Contaminated Scrubs..do you wear scrubs to the stores

[Nurseismade RN]

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.

[printsess]

Your scrubs should not leave your place of work. They can be contaminated and you don't know. If they are, and you wear a sweater or coat, or a seat belt, that too becomes contaminated. MRSA can live on fabric for up tp 90 days. The seat belt or sweater contaminates other clothing, and the cycle continues.

In an isolation room, the stethescope should not leave the room or should be properly decontaminated before being removed from the room. There should be a well defined policy that everyone is versed on. Peers should assist each other in learning it and in its compliance. If compliance with other staff is an issue, there should be a reporting system that is available to the employee.

A collaborative effort will control the spread of infection, and should be precieved as a positive attitude.

[JomoNurse]

I'm guilty of doing it. Who has the energy to drive home, shower, get dressed, and then go out? It's much easier just to stop some place on my way home. The community has more MRSA than any hospital does.

Some nurses are germaphobes to unnecessary degrees. :)

[Epona]

This is one of the best posts I've read in a long time! If I have come in contact with something really yucky then I wash my scrubs in the commerical laundromat. Otherwise, they go in my washer. I do keep my scrubs separate from my other clothes, and I spray my drivers seat with Lysol to help kill anything. So I do take extra precautions myself, but nothing extreme. And... I do run in and out of stores in my scrubs.

[lamazeteacher]

"......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.*" Quote from cherrybreeze's post # 58

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It's a known fact about fear, that the less is known about anything - be it MRSA, HIV, H1N1, (President Obama's health care bill), about the lifetime of various oranisms outside the host in mucous vs saliva and other body fluids, the more fearful individuals are, of it. They start making up rules, or cull methods from nursing texts over 50 years old.

When I was a student nurse, in the late '50s, we did have to leave our shoes in lockers at work and change to others, and street clothing! Uniforms were laundered and heavily starched (for free) at the hospital....... Graduate nurses could take home their uniforms and launder them there, but were advised not to put them with other household items to be laundered, use HOT water and harsh detergents.......

Practicality, and newer electronic microscopes ended those practices. The lifetime of bacteria and viruses outside their host was said to be minimal, except for spore bearing bacteria, like Tb.

The "Doctors" show on NBC last week reported that the wearing of sandals in New York City revealed culture results of many very dangerous organisms on the feet of those wearing sandals. So don't bare your feet on the streets of NYC! They went over the danger of using the "5 second rule" when food is eaten, that fell on the floor - so hang on to your Thanksgiving turkeys.

If you think nurses have excessive fears about communicable diseases, you might be amused to know that recommendations from owners of exotic birds have included changing clothing and shoes, and even shampooing hair, in the garage or outside, upon coming home after visiting bird shows, for at least 2 decades.

The not so funny thing about that is, that if "bird flu" (the source of the fear) was harbored by a bird at the show, that bird would die before the show was over. However some exotic bird owners still brave potential infection of their pets by coming to bird shows with them on their shoulders!

Docs who disregard isolation precautions, coming to the bedsides of their patients without adequate, recommended PPE are just acting like the peacocks they are! Exclusive use of hospitalists will rid hospitals of private physicians seeing their patients there, due to the dangers they present.......

[cherrybreeze, ADN, RN]

Your scrubs should not leave your place of work. They can be contaminated and you don't know. If they are, and you wear a sweater or coat, or a seat belt, that too becomes contaminated. MRSA can live on fabric for up tp 90 days. The seat belt or sweater contaminates other clothing, and the cycle continues.

In an isolation room, the stethescope should not leave the room or should be properly decontaminated before being removed from the room. There should be a well defined policy that everyone is versed on. Peers should assist each other in learning it and in its compliance. If compliance with other staff is an issue, there should be a reporting system that is available to the employee.

A collaborative effort will control the spread of infection, and should be precieved as a positive attitude.

If that were the case, it would be a policy (that scrubs wouldn't leave your place of work). It is not. Who's going to wash them? What about nurses who do home visits? Keep a change of clothes there? If there was enough evidence to prove that this would be best practice, a policy would be in place stating that it must be done, and JC would require facilities to have such a policy.

Stethescopes and other equipment don't leave an iso room without being decontaminated, you're right. They are in direct contact with the patient. I don't hold my body (scrubs) against my patients; in fact, in an iso room I have a gown covering them, and the gown doesn't leave the room. That's the point. If it were that much of a concern, we'd have to change clothes entirely before leaving an iso room, much less a hospital.

Again, I feel the general public carries as many, if not more, germs than I do when I leave work. We as nurses at least make active efforts to stay as *clean* as possible, which I don't believe can be said for the vast majority of the rest of the population. Many great points on that issue have already been made in this thread--visitors to iso patients don't gown up, and heaven only knows where THEY go once they leave.