Posts Tagged ‘hospital infections’
Nurses Shoes and Scrubs as Germ Free as Hands is Not Likely
September 23rd, 2008
Nurses Shoes and Scrubs Hold Germs
Nurses have gotten used to washing their hands many, times a day to lower the chances of transmitting germs but what about all the other protective clothes and nurses shoes that don’t get washed daily.
A recent New York Times article came out posing this question: Are nurses and medical staff clothing safe from transmitting hospital infections in and outside of the hospital?
Since there hasn’t been much hard statistical research done on this topic, the answer is somewhere between there’s been no explicit breakout due to medical clothing and medical shoes so why worry to there’s a risk since the materials in clothes and shoes can carry germs where every they go.
Tara Parker-Pope says that there is some data that indicates clothing and shoes are fill of germs but there has been no connecting role to spreading infections like MRSA, staph infections and pneumnia.
Here’s a good quote from the article:
…a Connecticut hospital sought to gauge the role that clothing plays in the spread of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. The study found that if a worker entered a room where the patient had MRSA, the bacteria would end up on the worker’s clothes about 70 percent of the time, even if the person never actually touched the patient.
“We know it can live for long periods of time on fabrics,” said Marcia Patrick, an infection control expert in Tacoma, Wash., and co-author of the Association of Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology guidelines for eliminating MRSA in hospitals.
Most Wear Nurses Shoes Many Times Before Cleaning Them
Nurses and medical staff often don’t wear the same scrubs and gowns for more than one shift but I’d like to raise the question of how many different kinds of germs are given a cookie crumb trail left behind by nurses shoes?
Most medical staff, nurses and doctors don’t go around cleaning their shoes with the same antibacterial soap they use on their hands regularly or detergent for their clothes and are more often wearing the same shoes on a regular basis.
What about the germs that are trapped under and spread around by every hospital worker’s shoe?
A Nurse Speaks Up for Minimizing Hospital Gear Outside Work
An ICU nurse raises an interesting comment about this article:
As an ICU RN, I cannot tell you how many patients I have treated with VRE or MRSA (two nasty drug resistant bacterial strains). Even with the precautions we take I will go into the locker room and change right after a shift because i do not want to risk exposing my family or anyone else I may incidentally come in contact with on the way home. I have never understood the tendency for RNs and MDs to wear their scrubs outside the hospital. I have encountered people in scrubs in gyms (already a breeding ground for MRSA), grocery stores, malls, and even restaurants. Certainly I understand the fatigue that makes one just want leave work without bothering with changing into street attire, but by acting with such disregard defeats the purpose of all we do in the hospital to curb the spread of these dangerous organisms.
Tags: germs in hospitals, hospital infections, medical scrubs, mrsa, nurses shoes
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