Proper attire for doing injections

[Louisville04]

What is the dress code for doing injections under fluoroscopy?

I have seen physicians wear scrubs with or without a mask, and booties. Some show up wearing scrubs while others change in the facility.

I also seen some physicians doing injections in regular street clothes (shirt and tie)

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[Pain_doc]

I wear scrubs (because I'm lazy and like other people to do the laundry) at work. For the injection procedures, I wear a hat/mask/sterile gloves. I use sterile garb if its discography. I have other personnel wear hats & anyone in close contact with the field wears a mask also.

Previously, I performed all my procedures in an office, in which case I would tuck my tie into my shirt and place hat/mask/gloves on. I still changed into scrubs if it was going to be more than an injection (SCS trial, discography, etc,) as it gets hot with the lead and a sterile gown on.

 

[Mister Mxyzptlk]

For routine injections I just wear scrubs and sterile gloves. No mask or hat. I started that several years ago after seeing others who were not wearing masks or hats. At first I was blown away but I saw their track record and adopted their style. Discos & implants are still done with "full metal jacket".

Now that you mention it, there has been a huge change that I guess happened so slowly I didn't notice it. When I was first starting out as an intern in 1979 there were very strict rules about scrubs. If you left the OR in your scrubs you had to wear a lab coat. You had to remove and discard your hat, mask and shoe covers, and you put on new ones when you came back to the OR. If you showed up in scrubs they demanded that you change into fresh ones. Urologists used to wear masks to do cystos.

Now I see people walk in and out of the hospital in scrubs (many of them custom scrubs with their names embroidered, obviously worn from home), and the nurses have cute little cloth hats with colorful designs that they seem to wear every day without washing in between. I see OR staff eating in the cafeteria with their hats on, shoe covers on, masks dangling around their necks. One place I worked the cataract patients were taken back to the OR in their street clothes.

Obviously the office environment is nowhere near as sterile as the OR, yet more and more procedures are being done by most specialties in the office, evidently without causing epidemics of staph infections.

Things seem to have lightened up considerably.

 

[lobelsteve]

We wear scrubs from home, shoe covers get worn all day long (but should not be). We wear hats in the ASC but not in the office based fluoro.
Sterile gloves for all procedures.

I thought I had a discitis a few months ago and went into full panic mode. I started making everybody (the fellows) wear full sterile gowns, masks, and using a full lap sheet. My senior attending (the big boss) told me I was overreacting- he reversed my policy based on his 15 years of clinical experience and never having a case of discitis. More is better but it may be overkill. We use a lot of ABX peri, intra, and post operatively.
The patient as it turned out did not have discitis, but I may be the first pain doc to diagnose vertebral metastasis on discography- the contast all disappeared through an eroded endplate into the vertebrae- or what was left of the vertebrae.

In the office, as long as you have sterile gloves and that your tie does not drag into the field you will be fine.

In the ASC- policy will dictate- but it will dictate at least a hat, booties, and your fluoro gear.

DO NOT FORGET EYE PROTECTION-both for fluoro and for splashes.

 

[Pain_doc]

I didn't always wear a mask, but ever since a public lawsuit about and epidural infection....
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9818616/page/2/

 

[spondy14]

That was an indwelling epidural from a birth..a bit different from the regular epidural

 

[Pain_doc]

Not any different to patients who will occasionally ask about it. I perform my procedures in surgery centers, the masks are readily available, and if it makes the patient happy, so be it.

 

[Aether2000]

My preferred attire would be flip flops, shorts, and a moth eaten t-shirt. However, due to having to compete with the freshly pressed dark blue scrubs with masks and hats in coordinating colors used by the local hospital, I wear not-so-crisp scrubs during procedure days. We do not wear hats, and only wear masks in the office procedure suite on special occasions (high infection risk patients, Halloween, bank robberies, etc).

 

[Aether2000]

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[Aether2000]

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[Mister Mxyzptlk]

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Cut it out. I keep looking for footnotes.

 

[Aether2000]

The asterix is there due to the frustration of working with Vista on my new Walmart computer that is slowing down everything to a snail's pace and resulting in triple posting. Perhaps I should try a KMart computer....
My formerly very nice HP computer motherboard recently fried and thus the new computer with all the Vista nonsense. I am scouring the internet for drivers for the programs to operate on this OS...

 

[PainDr]

I have to admit...I wear a hat, mask and eye protection, as well as sterile gloves for all procedures. I'm sure it's probably overkill, but that's the way I was trained. Also, the one time I forgot my mask, I had a patient abruptly jerk while injecting local and I got sprayed. Ever since then I've been really paranoid about wearing full protection.

 

[Doctodd]

The patient as it turned out did not have discitis, but I may be the first pain doc to diagnose vertebral metastasis on discography- the contast all disappeared through an eroded endplate into the vertebrae- or what was left of the vertebrae.

funny how the MRI didnt show the mets.

T