If you wear this in a restaurant, you are part of the problem.
This article just popped up on my RSS reader: What residents and medical students should wear in the hospital | KevinMD.com.
From the article:
5. Scrubs are for the hospital not for home. As a New York Times article pointed out, no one wants to sit next to someone on the subway wearing scrubs, particularly those with uncharacterizable stains on them. Scrubs are there, in part, to keep you from taking hospital germs into the community. It’s also hospital policy. Unless a resident or student is staying overnight or involved with procedures, scrubs are a ‘dressed down’ look. So plan to change from scrubs to regular clothes before you wander around outside the hospital.
This is so true. I think one of my biggest pet peeves about some of my fellow med students is that so many of them wear scrubs like a badge of honor, as if scrubs are some sort of social signifier that really sets them apart from the rest of humanity. I can see why a med student who has studied for a billion years to earn the privilege to scrub into surgery might get the impression that scrubs are some special power garment, but the truth is, they just aren’t. There are people who have a high school diploma (or less) who have access to that same pile of scrubs in the hospital locker room. They’re nothing special.
Don’t get me wrong, I wear scrubs in the hospital when I’m supposed to, but you can bet your ass I change out of them before I go out in public. The other night, a friend of mine showed up to a restaurant wearing scrubs. Here is a person I respect and whose company I enjoy, but the whole time he was sitting there I couldn’t get over the fact that he was “one of those med students” who has no shame about going out in public wearing surgical scrubs. I’m sorry, but if you’ve been cutting open abdomens all day long, I don’t really think you should be sitting next to me at dinner until you put on normal clothes. Is that too much to ask? Who knows what sort of viscera is hiding out in that fabric. Ugh.
On the other hand, if you have a pair of clean scrubs at your house, they definitely do make a nice pair of PJs, there’s no denying that!
Aside from that, there are a lot of other good pieces of advice in the article. Having only minimal hospital experience thus far, I can’t think of much to add to the list in the article. Any thoughts?
Link: What residents and medical students should wear in the hospital | KevinMD.com.
Tags: attire · hospital dress · scrubs2 Comments
Guilty.
I’ve been given some scrubs with the company insignia to wear to work… and I’m a receptionist (except for the one or two times I have to fill in for the dental assistant). For me, wearing scrubs on my commute (on the subway) is normal, as it is for many New Yorkers in health-related fields. Really, come take a train in NYC and you’ll have yourself a nice heart attack if it bothers you that much. But, frankly, it’s just much more convenient. I don’t want to be lugging around a change of clothing. Plus there’s always that chance that the train will be delayed (which, really, is beyond your control sometimes) and you’ll end up walking into the office dressed in street-clothes, looking totally unprofessional (and don’t go saying that you can just dress up professionally if that’s really a problem–because that only doubles dress-up time), etc. I’m not trying to make excuses, and clearly we’re talking about two different kinds of scrub-wearing, but I think some people (i.e., myself) have perfectly valid reasons for wearing scrubs in public!
But, if you’ve done surgery in scrubs–yeah, I think that’d be a TAD gross (especially to eat in).
My apologies for the rant,
Rad
I see your point. I agree that you have a valid reason to wear scrubs. I think public transportation should grant you a pass with regards to wearing scrubs. Wearing scrubs while eating out at a restaurant, or going out to the movies, however, is totally gross and unacceptable, as far as I’m concerned. I’m embarrassed every time my friends do it.
I couldn’t agree more. I do see the point that radmazin makes, but generally, scrubs are a sanitarity-thing. You bring outside germs into the hostpital by wearing them outside of the building, and vice verca. Would you rub your dirty dinner on your clothes and still wear them outside? Or how about your own bodily fluids? No? Because that is basically what you are doing by wearing your scrubs on after a shift at the hostpital. Or maybe not that extreme, but you get my point. Scrubs should either stay entirely outside of the hostpital or inside. The outside and inside environments should not be mixed.