If you work at Duke, or at any of the medical and research facilities around Durham, you have a laundry problem most people do not. The question is not how to get your clothes clean. It is what you bring home and where it goes once you walk through the door.
Most hospitals launder scrubs on site precisely so this does not fall to the individual. But a great many people in healthcare wash their own, and everyone in the field brings home the layer underneath, the shoes, the bag, and the coat, whatever the policy says about the scrubs themselves.
This is a laundry article rather than an infection control article. Your employer’s policy is the authority on anything clinical. What follows is the practical part.
Set up a landing zone before you get to the bedroom
The single most useful thing is a physical boundary between the door and the bed, and it costs nothing.
Pick a spot near the entrance. A basket, a hook, a chair. Work clothes come off there and go straight into it. Not on the bed, not on the bedroom chair, not draped over the dresser.
The bed is the thing worth protecting, because you spend eight hours with your face against it. Anything that sits on the bed for thirty seconds has transferred whatever it was carrying to a surface you will be breathing against later.
Shoes come off at the door and stay there. Shoes are the item that has been on the most floors.
The bag is the one nobody thinks about. It goes on the floor at work, then on your kitchen counter at home. Give it a spot that is not a surface you use, and wipe it down periodically.
Washing work clothes
Wash them separately from household laundry and from bedding in particular. Not because of any dramatic risk, but because separating them costs nothing and it keeps the two categories from mixing.
Hot water, as hot as the fabric allows. This is one of the situations where temperature genuinely matters rather than just feeling more thorough. Most scrub fabrics are polyester blends that tolerate it.
Use an enzyme detergent. Enzymes break down organic residue rather than lifting it off the surface, which is what you want on anything protein-based.
Do not overload. A packed drum cannot rinse, and rinsing is most of what you are relying on.
Dry on high heat when the fabric allows. Heat in the dryer does real work, and it is frequently the more effective half of the process.
Wash the bag and the outerwear on a schedule rather than never. Those are the items that go months.
When someone at home is sick
Same principles, more attention.
Handle the sick person’s bedding as its own load. Wash it hot, dry it hot, and wash your hands afterward, which is the step people skip because handling laundry does not feel like handling a patient.
Do not hug a pile of it against your body on the way to the machine. Use a basket.
Wash the bedding again once they are better and the illness has run its course, and let the mattress protector go through too. If a protector is old and the membrane has failed, this is the moment to replace it rather than the moment to hope.
Run an empty hot cycle in the washer afterward, with a cup of white vinegar. Front-loaders in particular hold moisture in the door gasket, and a machine that has been running heavy loads benefits from the reset.
The bed itself
Weekly for sheets is the baseline, and if you are on nights and sleeping during the day, every four or five days is closer to right, because a daytime bedroom is warmer and you sweat more.
The mattress protector is the layer doing the actual work and it is the one most often forgotten. Wash it every other time you do the sheets. Warm water, never hot, low or no dryer heat, and never fabric softener, because heat and softener both destroy the waterproof membrane that makes it a protector rather than a sheet.
Hold it up to a window twice a year. Pinholes of light mean the membrane has failed.
Own two protectors and three sets of sheets. On a shift schedule, the ability to strip and remake immediately is the difference between the bed getting changed and the bed not getting changed.
What actually helps versus what feels like it helps
Fabric softener and dryer sheets do nothing useful here and they leave a coating that reduces absorbency. Skip both.
Antibacterial laundry additives are largely unnecessary if you are washing hot with a decent detergent. Heat and detergent are doing the work.
Fragrance masks rather than removes. If something still smells after washing, it needs washing again rather than covering.
What does help: hot water, enzyme detergent, a drum that is not overloaded, thorough drying, and the physical separation of work things from sleeping things.
Where the machines help
Running scrubs hot and separate, plus household laundry, plus bedding every few days, is three streams of laundry on a schedule that is already fragmented by shift work.
The machines at our self-service laundry on Guess Road let you run all three at once in separate drums rather than sequentially over three evenings, which is the practical answer when your days off do not line up with anyone else’s.
They also reach genuine commercial wash temperatures, which matters when your home water heater is set to 120 degrees for scald safety and your machine’s hot setting never actually gets where you assumed it was going.
Our wash-dry-fold service covers the household side if the schedule is unforgiving that week.
The short version
Build a landing zone by the door so work clothes never touch the bed. Shoes off at the door, bag out of the kitchen. Wash work clothes separately, hot, with enzyme detergent, in a drum that is not overloaded, and dry them hot. Treat a sick household member’s bedding as its own hot load and wash your hands afterward. Wash the mattress protector every other sheet change, and never with heat or softener. Own two protectors and three sets of sheets, because on shift work the bed only gets changed if it can be changed immediately.
WaveMAX Durham is at 3222 Guess Road, easy to reach from north Durham and the surrounding neighborhoods. If you want to talk through a routine that fits a rotating schedule, call us at (919) 748-3180.
Your employer’s infection control policy governs anything clinical. This covers laundry only.