I am a nurse on a general children's ward so I get every kind of patient you can think of. I also struggle with OCD so, at the moment, I have a ritual for when I get home from work that even I think is a little bit crazy but I can't make myself stop. I thought a good idea would be to get fellow nurses insight on it so I could get some perspective on what is "normal" and what isn't. I should say I wash my hands frequently when I'm at work and always wash them before I leave the hospital.
When I get home, I strip immediately and leave my uniform in a small wardrobe where it will wait until I have enough uniforms to fill up the washer. No one is allowed to touch this wardrobe. I also leave my shoes at the door, and then proceed to use Dettol wipes to clean every door knob I might have touched. Finally I also wipe my mobile with Dettol wipes, making sure I don't touch any part of it with my unclean hands - this is a big issue for me as I then take my mobile to bed with me. After all this I take a shower and wash my hair.
I realize that all this is a bit much but I am terrified of contaminating my home/my family with some of the horrible bugs I see everyday.
I literally take no special precautions when i get home. But i do have a separate pair of shoes that i leave at work.
Sometimes i don't even shower when i get home (Dont judge me )
lol I don't either. I hate going to bed with wet hair. Even if I dried it it would still look a fright when I get up. If I'm going right back to work I would rather be freshly showered before i leave the house.
I agree with the others. This week with the norovirus and C diff outbreak, I've stepped up my game. Wiping my shoes and leaving them in the garage and changing as soon as I got home.
Specializes in Clinical Research, Outpt Women's Health.
The infected are everywhere. Everywhere! LOL.
I think washing your hands, cleaning your phone when you leave work, and throwing your scrubs in the bin and washing them separately are reasonable precautions. The rest seems excessive since "the infected", cue the Walking dead theme here, are everywhere. Stores, school, parks, offices.........
I shower before going to work and right after I get home. But not because germs. I just feel gross and want to freshen up after 12 hours in scrubs. And I need to in the morning to make myself wake up!
I have a pretty great immune system, I guess - haven't gotten sick in ages. I do extensive hand hygiene and wipe my phone down. I'm on a transplant team and unit, so we have generally high hygiene standards, I think. As others have stated, if we are having a noro outbreak or something along those lines, I step it up a bit, mainly in the interests of protecting my transplant patients.
I am an adult asthmatic. I do wear a basic mask around people with coughs or respiratory infections for the simple fact that when I do get sick, it's respiratory in nature and there are times it has been serious... all long before I was ever a nurse.
I had one mega exposure without a mask - a patient who was later found to have klebsiella pneumonia went in to respiratory distress...I rushed in to help and stupidly bent over the patient to auscultate. Patient proceeded to cough a copious amount of bloody sputum in my face and down my neck. I didn't even suffer a sniffle, not even being on inhaled corticosteroids at the time. Of course I followed facility protocol for the exposure and followed up with my primary care provider and the pulmonary dude.
I wash my scrubs separately for a critically important reason: lint is a plague worse than any super bug.
loriangel14, RN
6,933 Posts
lol I don't either. I hate going to bed with wet hair. Even if I dried it it would still look a fright when I get up. If I'm going right back to work I would rather be freshly showered before i leave the house.