Nursing uniform has gone through many changes over the decades. It was first designed to resemble nun’s habit and then minor changes were done to it till mid 1940s. There are no significant change done and the basic shape and the features remained the same. From 1940s, the nursing uniform started changing dramatically and by 1990s, it was totally a different uniform altogether in many parts of the globe.
By 1990s, the United States started using a variation of nurse uniform called nursing scrubs. These look like a regular shirt and pants worn by surgeons. These nursing scrubs were available in different colors and patterns, mainly differentiating the grade of the nurse. Other than that, there was no additional feature.
There have been a few reasons for the emergence of scrubs in the nursing uniform. First of all, it is not a complicated dress as the traditional nursing uniform. The traditional nursing uniform has many features and includes a few parts of cloths. As a matter of fact, the traditional nursing uniform does not give a lot of comfort for the people who are wearing the uniform and it could be more uncomfortable when it comes to attending to an emergency situation. When it comes to surgeon’s shirt and pants, it was the perfect dress for dressing neat and simple. Since there are no complications, the surgeons could focus on what they are supposed to be doing; surgeries.
This was the main reason that surgeon’s suit was adopted as a variation to the nurses uniform. The nursing scrubs are now being used by almost all the healthcare institutes of the United States and everyone is adapting to the use of nursing scrubs. Although this is the case for more of the healthcare institutions, there has been resistant to the nursing scrubs at some other places.
The argument bring up by the nurses who oppose the nursing scrubs is that the nursing scrubs cannot distinguish the nurse from hospital cleaners and surgeons. They also argue that nursing scrubs does not bring the dignity the nursing profession has earned over decades. However, these complaints are made by most of the old generation nurses who have been the ‘old school’ crowed in the healthcare industry. This type of conservative and orthodox thinking is common to other conservative countries such as the UK and some 3rd world countries. These countries try to keep the traditional nursing uniform live and show no sign of moving to the nursing scrubs. But in the UK, some hospitals have started using the nursing scrubs for their nurses.
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