In the past, when you went to a hospital and saw the staff walking around in scrubs, you probably thought that they wore them as a means of identifying themselves as being people who worked there. Aside from being ridiculously comfortable, they didn’t offer much protection from bacteria. They also seemed to have very little variety in their appearance.
That’s not the case anymore. Nowadays, they are available in a wide range of colors and they can have creative patterns. If you are interested in getting the best medical wear, you can check out infectious.com.au.
Silver Threads
Companies make scrubs with silver threads that have bacterial-fighting properties. Medical personnel will be able to wear them knowing that they are better shielded from things like MRSA, pneumonia, and staph.
Copper Threads
Other companies are taking this a step further, since silver requires the surrounding environment to be hot. Which means that the person wearing it has to be sweaty. That’s not the case with copper, which also has antimicrobial properties. You just need to wait for two hours for the copper threads to kill 99% of bacteria.
RFID
While there are a lot of scrubs to go around in a place like a large hospital, they need to be tracked in some sort of way for inventory purposes. That is where RFID comes in. They are seamlessly woven into the fabric of the scrubs and make for easy scanning. RFID can help those large hospitals monitor who is there at a given time.
Biometrics
There are things out now that can track things like your heart rate, your blood pressure, and other devices. Those items can be very bulky, though. They can also distract you at certain times of the day when they activate and collect data. What if they could make things that fit into the fabric of scrubs? That would make things even easier in terms of data collection .. and patients could sleep without these bulky items.
While technology is a necessary thing to be integrated with medical scrubs, there are other areas that could stand to be improved. They include
- Making sure that the scrubs are extra comfortable. The makers of these scrubs do a lot of research to design them. It’s not a one-day process by any means. That means going in-depth with the fitting process and making a lot of different prototypes before settling on the one that gets the most feedback.
- Making sure that there is a lot more variety, including scrubs that have fuller fits and pants that are flared. There are also scrubs that accentuate people’s figures thanks to a tighter fit.
- Making sure that the scrubs have more functionality. There are more pockets being added to these outfits. Manufacturers also plan to add things like lace, pleating, zippers, and volume to these scrubs. They are being created to help the people who wear them feel good about wearing them and also make their jobs easier.
In the past, the scrubs might have been viewed as being more of an afterthought – a relatively mundane uniform, but it was observed that they could actually carry diseases around the hospital, especially when the people wearing them worked long shifts. That is where this trend of antimicrobial threads came in. It was a way to make things safer for both the people that wear them and the patients that they attend to. These improved scrubs work well with masks and gloves to provide a safer environment for all.
The main thing to keep in mind is that the medical field is always moving forward. They are upgrading their technology all the time. The days of plain scrubs are long over. Before too long, they will be part of medical history. As more materials are found and the processes of making them are refined, they will be able to easily mass produce them and allow for a truly high-tech medical field.
People that work in hospitals or other medical care settings are always seeing people who have germs that can make them sick. That is why the companies that make medical scrubs and other gear have focused on making the fabric be antimicrobial, which offers an extra layer of protection. Medical technology is always advancing, even in sectors that you wouldn’t think would need it. In the upcoming years, there will be more improvements made to these scrubs so that they can help make it safer to work in certain high-risk environments.