5 Tips to Properly Washing Your Scrubs

Are you properly washing your scrubs?
We all know that working as a nurse in a hospital or doctors office makes you susceptible to all types of bacteria and germs that you wouldn’t want to take home and expose your family to. Yet many hospitals don’t have you wash your uniforms at work, so how can you make doing your laundry as sanitary as possible? Here are 5 tips to properly wash your scrubs, and keep those nasty little microbials from getting into your house.

1. After you purchase your scrubs, before you wear them for the first time wash them on cold with half a cup of vinegar. This will help preserve the color and prevent fading. Only wash the new pair of scrubs in this laundry load. This also helps the life of your scrubs and will make them last longer.
2. When you start your work laundry, soak your scrubs in color safe bleach for 5 minutes. This will help kill the bacteria, while not affecting the color of your scrubs. Be sure to set a timer though, soaking your scrubs in bleach too long could damage the fabric.
3. Wash only your scrubs together, don’t mix with your family laundry. This will ensure that bacteria and microbials are not passed to the other clothing in the wash. Wash your scrubs at a high temperature as close to 160F as possible to help kill any live bacteria that may be on your scrubs, use an allergen free laundry detergent.
4. Make sure to remove your clothes from the washer right away. When you leave clothes in the washer in that damp state it promotes the growth of germs and bacteria.
5. Lastly make sure that you dry your clothes in the dryer, if you are worried they will shrink then it is best to get them dry cleaned. The heat of the dryer will help kill off any other mircrobials that are on your clothing.

These steps will help to make sure that you are not bringing all of those germs from work into your home, and germs from home to your work.

How do you wash your scrubs? Do you take any special measures?