Elizabeth Jones, head of the patient environment for the DoH, is involved in the working party to draw up guidelines on the wearing and laundering. Her talk covered many angles, including why they are worn, cleanliness, cultural issues, doctors' clothing, and different type of uniforms.
She said that the guidelines will be advisory rather than prescriptive. The working party is looking into areas where guidance was needed.
On the subject of laundering, Jones said that the likely recommendations were that, ideally, staff should change into and out of uniform at work and that uniforms should be laundered via the workplace.
As a second option, staff should change at work and launder uniforms at home but be given guidance on how this should be done. The third and least desirable option was that staff would changing at home and launder their uniforms at 60C.
Later in the program, Carmel Edwards, senior infection control nurse for the Wirral returned to the subject, looking at contamination risks, and reviewing recent studies. Parry (2001) found that 30% of uniforms were contaminated at the beginning of a shift, while an earlier study found that 30% did not change uniform daily. But is there any evidence that contaminated uniforms will affect patients.
Last year the RCN Wipe it Out campaign also came up with recommendations, but there were practical problems such as lack of changing facilities, lack of in-house laundries.
In conclusion, Edwards pointed out that the implications of any recommendations would have to be considered. Knee-jerk reactions were to be avoided. It will also be necessary to consider non-uniform staff, community staff and hospital facilities.
In addition to the uniform question, the conference examined other hygiene related topics, including linen standards, the revision of HSG(95)18 and included a talk by Paul Meads of Sunlight on the practicalities of implementing a clean-room policy drawing on experiences at one of the Sunlight laundries. This proved extremely popular with the delegates.
A full report on the conference will appear in LCN in June.
