Scrubs show up in The Real World. I don’t remember the details but I was once sent home from a hospital wearing a scrub shirt. (Nothing big, might have had a shirt goofed up somehow when doing the thing when they spun me around with a barium shake looking for GI reflux, or something.) I kept it in my desk drawer at work in case I needed a spare. One day I looked down and my white golf shirt was all blood red! Evidently I’d had a bloody nose without noticing it (I looked like I was gut-shot). So I was happy to have the spare shirt. I’m sure I used it other times, for spilled mustard or something equally traumatic.
I see scrubs. I wouldn’t expect to see them in a fern bar, but wouldn’t blink seeing them in the supermarket.
As noted, scrubs have become the standard uniform for hospital workers and well as many office medical personnel. Scrubs are not sterile, but surgical scrubs are clean. In other words, when you go to do a surgery you put on scrubs in the locker room which is not sterile. You also put on your shoe covers, mask and hat which are also not sterile. After you scrub, you enter the OR (classic “avoid touching the door with your hands pose”) where you don a sterile gown and gloves. The only sterile area in the OR is your front from about your shoulders to your waist. If you accidentally touch anywhere else you may have to rescrub. Once you’ve left the OR, many doctors and nurses don’t bother to change.
It doesn’t make sense for people who wear scrubs in a non-sterile environment to change if they are just coming or going directly from work to home. My staff wear scrubs as their official uniform (although street clothes are OK too) and the only time they change is when they need to go someplace else after work.
I used to go to my doctor’s office (just a regular office, not a hospital setting) regularly, where they would check my blood pressure for free. One of the nurses there (I don’t know who was really a nurse or other kind of assistant) wore a shirt festooned with little pictures of hypodermic needles.
And they wondered why I always got high blood pressure readings.
Huh. My friend is a paediatric nurse in the Netherlands, and she is only allowed to put on her scrubs once inside. I know this because there is a scheduling problem with the child care facilities: it opens at the same time the shift starts, and means you need to drop off, kiss goodbye, run inside and then still change. They are not allowed to already have their scrubs on to save time, and they’re not even allowed to go inside, change and then take the kid outside to the child care.
Scrubs aren’t tailored, so they don’t need to come in a lot of sizes (five sizes for tops, and five short, five long, for the pants, maybe, as opposed to nurses dresses that came in regular women’s dress sizes, which could mean size 2-26, if a hospital wanted to keep clean ones on hand), and they don’t need to be different for men and women. It lets a hospital keep a lot of clean ones handy for people who do need to change on the job because they get something spilled on their clothes (and it might not be blood, they might just get a food tray dumped on them, but stuff happens), and it’s very easy and fast to get in and out of a set of scrubs, so people who have to change don’t lose a lot of time.
I have no connection to the medical profession but I buy “Dickies” scrub cargo pants to use as lounging pants. I run hot and hate sweatpants, oddly enough they make me sweat. It’s nice to get off work and be able to go home and put on something cool, soft and comfortable with and elastic waistband and lots of pockets. I don’t wear them out in public much but they don’t look to bad. I doubt anyone would notice.
The local mall here has a store that sells mostly scrubs in a whole variety of colors and patterns. No ID required to shop there/ The last time I was in a Walmart, they were selling what looked an aweful lot like scrubs.
Maybe I missed it but I’m shocked that no one has mentioned how non-medical people wore scrubs out in public quite a bit in the early 1980’s. It was quite the fashion trend. It was around that same time that women started wearing the white “nurse” nylons to the office.
That’s one reason I hated to wear them at work when I was in medicine. To me they just don’t feel like clothes. They are the fashion equivalent of sweats. I was a respiratory therapist, so I wore a long white lab coat over my street clothes, Soniscope® Stethoscope hung around my neck like a tie.
That’s a good point. I wonder to what extent some of them are like the people who always walk around in gym clothes or the stolen valor videos of civilians in soldiers uniforms who are all going around trying to get respect. But, I have the feeling that there is a good reason for it though.
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