Why are hospital staff wearing uniforms, scrubs and white coats in public?

One of our big hospitals is around the corner from my local grocery store. This location is handy for hospital staff, who can pop in for groceries on their way home from a long shift. And it also makes it über-creepy for those of us who watch them leaning over the produce bins while still wearing the same bacteria-laden scrubs, white coats or uniforms they’ve been wearing at work.

Here’s why I get the heebie-jeebies at this sight.  John Gever, Senior Editor at MedPage Today, has reported recently on a study suggesting that more than 60% of physicians’ coats and nurses’ uniforms sampled tested positive for disease-causing bacteria, including antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. 

A research team led by Dr. Yonit Wiener-Well found that for 63% of the physicians and nurses studied, at least one spot sampled on their outer clothing carried pathogenic bacteria. Their study was published in the September 2011 issue of the American Journal of Infection Control. These researchers were following up previous studies that had also found bacterial contamination on a variety of clothing articles worn by physicians, nurses, and other health care workers.

Here’s where the study’s findings soar decidedly higher on the Cringe Scale: just under 60% of participants said their garments were fresh that day, whereas 18% admitted that they hadn’t been changed in four or more days – and most of this group were physicians’ white coats.

Nearly one-quarter of participants rated their own clothing as “not clean”.

Antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria were found in 6% of the physician samples and 14% of those taken from nurses’ clothing.

Read the rest of this article by Carolyn Thomas at HEART SISTERS.