The Theatre Department is urging all staff to check their homes and return any raspberry colour scrubs that may be lying around in laundry boxes, drawers, wardrobes or the back of cars!
The request has been prompted to ensure the supply chain is maintained and a bin is being set up in theatre changing rooms where you can return any scrubs with no questions asked!
The Theatre Department at Forth Valley Royal Hospital is one of the biggest departments in the hospital with over 170 nurses along with some 55 anaesthetic doctors and close to 100 surgeons of various specialities and grades, not to mention students and visitors. We run 16 theatres every day along with four minor ops rooms and help staff our fantastic critical care unit. Due to the nature of their work theatre staff need a clean set of scrubs every day as well as quick access to spares (you will be surprised at the range of different bodily fluids that can come into contact with clothing during certain operations!)
Other staff from across the hospital site also use scrubs for a range of reasons and often acquire these from the Theatre Department. Unfortunately, most of these do not make their way back to the theatre laundry service. This depletes the supplies available and can lead to unnecessary stress and delays when there are insufficient sizes or supplies available for staff who needs these most.
To help improve the situation, the Theatre Department will be introducing a scrub vending machine which will:
- limit access to scrubs to theatre staff (surgeons, anaesthetists and theatre practitioners)
- will only enable scrubs to be dispensed to individual users, when the previous set of scrubs have been returned.
In the meantime, theatre staff would be really grateful to anyone out-with the Department who returns any raspberry scrubs they have acquired.
Staff who don’t work in theatres who want to wear scrubs can arrange for their service or department to order and manage their own sets of scrubs in a different colour like the Woman and Children’s Unit.
