Over the years, it became associated with being a physician…the good old days, when hospitals would actually do laundry. There was even a hierarchy: Short coats for students, long coats for residents, and long coats with cloth buttons(frogs) for attendings…

In the last 20 or so years, however, everyone started wearing white coats. Nurses, techs, people who actually (gasp!) worked in labs, janitors, porters, etc. And hospitals went from providing them daily, crisp and fresh, to providing the residents with a couple (to last their entire residency), to not providing them at all – and no laundry, either.

Now, if physicians are going to walk around in grimy, filthy, coats (and many do, unfortunately) in the hospital or in their office, there’s not much that can be done for them. They’re beyond caring about professional appearances, and so are probably beyond professional behavior. After all, how hard is it to wash a coat when doing the laundry (a skill that most young physicians seem to have not learned, either – both sexes, too). The ‘modern’ polyester blend coat can be laundered (soap, bleach, hot water, just like your underwear) and hung to dry, it will never look good but at least it won’t look bad. And the stains do come out.

As far as not wearing them at all, if that is the case then we must do away with all other fomites: STARTING WITH THE NECKTIE. A sexist piece of stupidity, symbolizing how men (since women are excused from wearing them in the hospital) tie a ceremonial noose around their necks daily. It may be silk (or some god-awful synthetic) but it’s still a noose, and usually affixed after ritualistically slashing ones throat in a process called ’shaving’. Not willing to submit to the ’system’, I grew a beard: Take that, you mindless drones!

But, lets not stop there: ID badges (especially those on lanyards), stethoscopes, pagers, and all the rest of hospital impedimenta must be sterilized and sanitized, in the name of protecting our patients. Carrying too much stuff? Too bad, learn to do without. If you have a little piece of paper in a pocket that can be lost, it WILL be lost – so don’t have them at all. Can’t remember a drug dose? Then why are you doing prescribing it? Two Tylenol for everyone!

Or, perhaps hospitals can just start providing and laundering the coats. I think somehow I’ll be able to remember my name, degree and specialty without seeing it on my coat, and I doubt that my patients care except as it helps them get better. With a coat on my necktie stays in place, my impedimenta is hidden, and my patients, and my family, are safe.

And I don’t really care if my buttons are cloth or not.

The hospital is the correct facility for making this happen. Industrial laundry.

As for ties, and while they may look neat, they are merely decoration and are better disposed of in a health care setting where fomites ought to be discouraged.

Many housestaff have lockers where they dump their coats (including the white coat–you don’t want to bring than thing home.) Instead of putting it back in the locker, the coat ought to go in the laundry hamper, just like scrubs. The locker room is the logical place for that: clean coat pickup and dirty coat drop-off.

It is true that coats become walking file cabinets. Don’t know the answer to all that.

But I fell in love with this garment. One does not see bacteria but blood, vomitus, urine, pus, spill from injections or IV fluids are the few of many things that my coat has protected me.

The study in discussion points that dirty coats harbor bacteria. If somebody does not change his coat for month, I think they need more education and reinforcement.

Its the habit that needs to be addressed and not the garment.

And for “Buckeye Surgeon,” they’ve also implemented a “bare below the elbow” policy across the UK, and many areas are starting to enforce a no-neck tie policy, too. Who knows what’s next?

Seriously? People are wearing the same white coat into icky hospitals for weeks on end without washing it?

I guess there’s no common sense class in med school?

Being in the humid south, that was often twice a day.

I bet it saved lives.

The office is a problem though.