Why scrubs?

[Pipandmum]

A couple of friends are asking for old bedding to make scrubs. I don't know why - you can easily buy scrubs and as they are laundered is there are shortage? I know they need to be a certain standard and material for use in hospitals, but any time I've been in hospital there are stacks and stacks for patients use, and I haven't heard that there is a shortage. So is it a case of people trying to be useful in some way and have thought of this? Are people outside hospitals (carers etc) needing them when they didn't before? And again you can still buy them so surely the companies that make them want to sell them...

Not sure if there is a scrub shortage but when I have to order my scrubs through work they come from abroad and take a while to come and they don't always have them.. even though my scrubs can be washed on a 90 degree wash they don't always get the stains out. When they have stains on or even a little mark on then we are not allowed to wear them anymore so we go through a lot of scrubs. I think people are just being helpful and making sure staff are not going short on them. It's good because some people are making them the right colours & materials for staff. Unfortunately although there is scrubs you can order online you can't just wear any scrubs they have to be a certain design etc.

I know a doctor working in an NHS hospital who feels there aren't enough scrubs available at his hospital at the moment. In his normal work, he wouldn't wear scrubs, but he's now been redeployed to coronavirus wards. In his hospital, there aren't enough scrubs for all new staff to be supplied with them, so they are having to wear their own clothes, which they then (obviously) wear home, which is an infection risk for others they live with.

Some hospitals are probably fine- some potentially aren't.

I've seen a couple of post about GPs mentioning scrubs. Now I've never seen a GP wearing scrubs so it may be that HCPs that previously wouldn't have been uniformed are wearing scrubs for easier changing and washing. Just a theory though.

My understanding of it is that HCPs who wouldn't normally wear scrubs now need to. And obv they each need multiple sets. Therefore any surplus hospitals did have will have been used up.

But if scrubs need to be certain colour and materials - surely old bedding is not going to meet that. The ones my friend posted on FB were nice but patterned! Maybe just for local non hospital staff in her case.

We have been told we now need to wear scrubs for face to face patient contacts (we are mostly online video calling). I've never worn scrubs before just normal clothes. Our trust has ordered us one set each, not sure if I would want some made of curtains or bedding as these may not watch well at high temps which is reason to wear scrubs. But I have seen other places requesting so perhaps if you are changing multiple times a day these are helpful.

In our local hospital a lot of the shortage is because staff are either assuming that everything that's been near a COVID patient needs disposing of immediately and so have thrown them away, or are taking them home at the end of the day rather than putting them into the laundry so it's taking longer to get them clean and ready for the next use.

Plus obviously that people such as the AHP who ordinarily would just wear clinical uniform now have to wear scrubs for certain procedures.

Yeah, we're wearing scrubs now when we didn't used to so there is a shortage. I know someone who said the only place he could get his from was a fancy dress shop!

Normally hospitals have ample supply of scrubs for those who wear them - theatre staff, ICU, anaesthetists, surgeons, sometimes A&E. These are laundered by the hospital. But now they want everyone in scrubs, so people who normally wear other uniform (nurses, physio etc) or their own clothes (lots of doctors, admin staff). And there just isn't enough to go round! Some people are buying their own but the usual sites are all out of stock. So there's a shortage.

I doubt the homemade ones will be going into hospital laundry/general circulation, but they still need to withstand hot washing.

There's a scrubs shortage in my local hospital, but seems to be a supply chain problem. Plenty of scrubs out there to purchase, they aren't complicated to make and don't need to pass any safety standards unlike PPE. We've been told just to buy ourselves and reclaim the cost from the trust

I doubt old bedding will be suitable, scrubs are coated with antibacterial properties.

Most scrubs are not coated, and even if they were, a few washes in an industrial machine at 60 degrees would strip off any coating