Umm… isn’t the visiblity of the dirt an advantage to white over-uniforms? If you can see the dirt, you know you’re less safe to treat patients, so go change.
I always thought that blue and green scrubs were preferable because blood didn’t look so “bloody” when compared with how it looked on a white uniform. Not sure where I got that info, but it makes sense.
No, because if our clothing becomes contaminated we change. It’s better to be able to change into relatively inexpensive scrubs rather than more pricey harder to maintain whites.
The dirt problem is more about stains that accumulate on whites.
This brings up another reason scrubs are perferable. Most white uniforms are polyester or nylon. They are hot, stain easily and turn gray after several launderings. They can’t be washed in hot water either. The occasional cotton white uniform I found had to be ironed and looked awful after a couple hours.
Scrubs can be washed in hot water and bleach, even those that aren’t 100% cotton.
nurse friends have told me the one and only time they wear whites and hats are at graduation.
It was reccommended here by somebody (forget who) that a great graduation gift for a nurse is a nice portrait photograph taken in her whites, since she’ll never wear them again. I’ve been saving that idea up for a rainy day.
When we married in '83, Deb still had her nursing cap and when it was lost or damaged in a move in '86 she went to great pains to replace it. When it was again lost or damaged in the 90s and I offered to get her a replacement, she said to not bother.
OTOH, I can only recall her actually wearing it to work on a few occasions in '84. (She moved out of hospital work into home health care in '84 and wore the cap without a uniform a few times, then dropped that practice as well.)
I suspect that the transition occurred in different years in different facilities and parts of ther country.
I was a bit of a holdout on the white uniform front; I wore them as long as I could still buy ones that were reasonably comfortable and practical. I found that as a psychological tool with confused older patients (I was working in a combined SNF/nursing home at the time) it couldn’t be beat. I was recognized as a ‘nurse’ by the demented when my coworkers wearing colorful scrubs weren’t. I was picky on them; they had to be fairly loose, they had to be on the longish (at the knee or a bit longer) side, they had to have BIG pockets, and they had to have a zip front, not buttons. And I wore a huge scrub jacket over them to provide more pocket space and warmth. Hospitals are COLD!
I stopped wearing white uniforms and switched to scrubs right around 1998-1999 or so.
Right now I’m working in a casual business office environment and I get to wear blue jeans!
I graduated in 1985 and my cap was never worn after that. IIRC, around that time there were some studies that came out that focused on caps as not being sanitary and there were actually hospitals in my area that banned them completely.
My mom’s an RN, and I asked her about when caps stopped being worn at work.
As she remembers it, is was when the hospitals started putting together neonatal ICU units. The nurses had to duck under equipment to work with their itty bitty patients and kept knocking off their hats. At some point, the nurses working NICU got permission to leave their caps off, and once that started, the other nurses petitioned for the same right.
My mom misses the days of the white uniform, because she says, everyone looked sharp and professional. Sometimes she find the scrubs look rather sloppy, but then, I expect she enjoys the comfort as much as any of the other nurses.
That’s probably because they’re still real uniforms here, not costumes. Both doctors and nurses still wear whites, and quite often the top is the type that buttons up on the far left, which is so old fashioned in the West that it’s associated with bad 50s mad doctor types.
At the hospital I spent a few weeks in when I broke my wrists about 5 or 6 years ago, the nurses wore dresses with caps. I tell ya, it was serious fetish-making material since I had casts on both arms past the elbow for the first couple of weeks and had to be assisted to eat, bathe, or go to the bathroom. Obviously, wanking it was impossible too. Most of the nurses were young, cute, and I hadn’t been laid in months. I found out that under those conditions erections happen with embarrassing frequency.
Safe for work links:
Japanese shopping site showing several kinds of nurse uniforms
Absolutely enormous site dedicated to nurses’ uniforms that I found when initially searching in English.
In the mid '70s the hospital where I worked did a study on caps. They weren’t required, but nursing admin wanted to change that. About 1/2 the staff wore them anyway.
A nurse from the Infectious Disease dept recuited several of us to culture as many caps as possible.
All of them, even the ones that had been wore only for a few weeks, were covered with bacteria, many of which were especially nasty.
The results were so dramatic, caps were eliminated completely.
Actually, they are practical, if you use bleach. That’s why butchers, lab techs and encierro runners wear white: you get home and toss it into the bleach bucket.
Clothes should never be reworn when you’re working in a hospital, that includes caps, hairnets etc.