Cleaning tips that will save your medical uniforms

Cleaning tips that will save your medical uniforms

Medical uniforms are part of a profession in which exposure to substances of various kinds is constant. Hence, cleaning requires the utmost care and apply some easy tricks to apply at home.

If you wear your medical uniforms daily and work in a health center, hospital, laboratory or in the pharmaceutical industry, pay attention, these tips will help you keep your clothes impeccable.

The relevance of the above lies in the savings in money that will mean not having to constantly renew the closet.

Home cleaning.

The most common is that we perform the cleaning of medical uniforms at home, especially if it involves removing common dirt. If so, the recommendation is to always use cold water and a program for delicate garments. Also, ironing should be delicate to eliminate wrinkles.

Prudence with the bleach.

Some bleaches, especially those that use chlorine, turn the color of the buttons yellow; therefore, to maintain the total white in all tissues, the indication is to use an oxygen-based product.

Lab coats.

They are garments that stain easily because those who wear them handle liquids and substances all the time. They are usually a piece that combines cotton and polyester so it is advisable to wash with warm water and make firm ironing.

Dry cleaning.

While the cleaning advice we give is to be done at home, if you have the possibility of taking your medical uniforms to laundry, do it. There they will do dry cleaning and professional ironing. An additional benefit is knowing how to treat a stain with chemicals.

Stain removal

There are several types of stains and ways to remove, here we will mention the most common ones and we provide tips to get read of them:

How to remove stains from your medical uniform?

Ink stains

Doctors, nurses, dentists, pharmacists, etc. They use pens every day to make reports, recipes or treatments and whether in a hurry, loss or speed it is very common to store the pen without having closed it, causing an ink stain in the pockets.

How to remove it?

One trick of our grandmothers, which still works very well with normal ink stains, is to soak them in warm milk. It can be done in a small bowl, occasionally rubbing the stain with the hands with circular movements. If the milk has been very dyed in ink, it will be necessary to change it. If the stain has not yet been removed, it is left to soak with bleach water for a couple of hours. It is then rinsed very well with cold water and usually washed in the washing machine to avoid the smell of milk.

Other tricks, you can remove the pen stain with lemon juice, or by making a mixture of 90º alcohol and vinegar in equal parts and rubbing the ink stain.

Bloodstains

 It is one of the most common spots that doctors and nurses face because of the number of medical procedures they can perform at the end of the day.

If we let blood spots dry or we don’t know how to treat them properly, it can become a problem and spoil the sanitary uniform. The most important thing is to remove them as soon as possible.

How to cleat it?

They can usually be removed by washing the garment thoroughly in cold water. If the bloodstain continues after washing, take your jacket or medical gown in a solution of ¼ gallon of warm water, ½ of liquid detergent and 1 tablespoon of ammonia for a period of 15 minutes. You can try to scrape the blood stain with care not to damage the garment and especially rinse it well with water to remove all the remains of ammonia, then you can put it in the washing machine and let it dry as you normally do.

Another effective trick to remove root blood stains from clothing is to dissolve an aspirin in the cold rinse water.

Let it stand and then put it in the washing machine with a cold water program. Especially if you use hydrogen peroxide or aspirin when putting blood-soaked clothes to soak, try to expose only the stained area and keep as much as possible the part of your clothes that is not affected.

Make sure the stain is completely removed if you iron the garment and there are still traces of blood it will be totally impossible to remove it.

Vomit Stains

 It is another type of frequent spot for nurses and auxiliaries, and that can seriously damage the work uniform if it is not cleaned quickly and efficiently.

The first thing to do is try to remove or scrape the vomit with a cloth and let the medical jacket soak in a bowl of cold water and apply a good amount of baking soda on the stain. Subsequently, pour a little lemon juice into the vomit until it begins to bubble and then rub the garment and rinse with cold water.

If there are any remaining vomit on the garment, do not put the garment in the dryer or the iron or the heat will fix the stain on the fabric forever.

Keep in mind that most uniforms are made of a mixture of polyester and cotton, so if your uniform is made of another material, these tips may not work.

What did you think of this article? What tricks do you use to clean your medical uniforms? Share your opinion with us.

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About the author

Sam Attal

Sam has been working in the healthcare industry for 5 years, she lives in Georgia with her husband and 2 dogs. She freelances as a content writer and loves to read about medical trends and share the knowledge around.

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