I have a number of articles that I have sitting and fermenting in my draft box…some of them beginning to near retirement age. But with the election, and then spooning more work on my plate, and then revamping my website (yes, my official memo about that is coming), and then updating Windows this weekend–well, poor blog. Gets ignored and left out. Plus there’s my other blog (www.moneyfaithandchocolate.com) that is really being ignored, and I have great plans to start yet another blog.

This is an interesting little story from the NY Times about scrubs. It’s a short piece and designed primarily for reader input. It asks the interesting question:

Should hospital scrubs be worn in public places?

That’s one of the questions asked by my Well column this week, which looks at the role clothing may play in the spread of germs by health workers. The issue of scrubs on the subway and other public places has been raised often by readers of the Well blog.

“I cringe every time I see a medical professional on the subway in their scrubs, which is a regular occurrence,” writes reader A.K.

I don’t think wearing soiled scrub clothes poses a threat to public health, unless you work in a level 4 biosafety lab, or just emerged from a cholera unit. My problem with scrubs is that they have lost their purpose.

When I first started working in NICU, the hospital supplied the scrubs. You wore them, then dumped them in the laundry bin, where they were washed with hospital detergent. Then it came about that alot of hospitals required nurses to wear their own scrubs. So these scrub clothes were worn into work, ie, like outside in the street, then worn in the unit, and then worn home. And who knows how many times they were worn before washing? The only place that maintained a strict protocol on scrub clothes was the OR. Fortunately…

Scrubs are now commonly worn by nurses all over the hospital. There’s nothing wrong with that, except the scrubs that they are wearing in places that are supposed to be a little ultra clean (aside from the OR) are no better than a regular uniform. Like the NICU. Shouldn’t nurses, doctors, etc, be wearing scrubs that never leave the hospital? That are washed in the hospital after one use, and washed with whatever disinfectants that are used to clean hospital laundry? Doesn’t that make sense?