Every day when Cliff Willmeng, RN, got home from a shift in the emergency department (ED), he took off his scrubs in a spot in the garage delineated with red duct tape, a spot his kids knew not to walk through. Then he raced through his house in his underwear, delaying hugs to his kids, heading straight to the shower. He hoped the routine would help keep COVID-19 away from his family.
The policy at his hospital, United Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota, dictates that emergency department nurses and technicians wear personal scrubs, laundered at home, whereas physicians and physician assistants can wear hospital-issued scrubs that are laundered on site.
One day, Willmeng decided enough was enough. Why should colleagues who worked in the same space for the same 12-hour shifts be subjected to different uniform restrictions? Why should he have to worry about coronavirus-saturated clothes when other employees at the same hospital didn't?
Several years ago, according to Zetella Caauwe, RN, the hospital started requiring ED nurses to wear their own navy blue scrubs. Cauuwe, who has worked at United for 23 years, says they made the change so that patients could distinguish nurses from doctors, who wore seal blue hospital-issued scrubs. But the policies vary from one hospital to the next in the same health system, and even from one department to the next in the same hospital.
Tired of the duality and fearing for his family's health, Willmeng and some of his nursing colleagues started wearing hospital-issued scrubs and changing on site.
