Nurses and other Tucson Medical Center employees who have expressed individuality through their choice of scrubs may wish it was an April Fools' joke.
As of tomorrow - April 1 - employees at Tucson's largest hospital will dress according to a scrubs/uniform color chart that will allow patients to easily identify workers in pharmacy (black) from, say transportation (dark blue) or housekeeping (brown).
The new dress code is about making life easier for patients and also celebrating the professionalism of those who work at TMC, officials said.
"A dress code policy can help improve the patient experience through 'communication by recognition'," hospital senior vice president and chief operations office Linda Wojtowicz said.
"Most patients will be able to look at the color of staff members' uniforms or scrub colors and know their individual roles."
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The change has been a year in the making to get employees ready for the switch.
TMC nurses will be in a shade of scrubs the hospital is describing as "Caribbean blue," which looks like a shade of teal on the decoder chart. But officials say it is decidedly different from the lighter "TMC teal" color that hospital volunteers will wear. And volunteers don't typically wear scrubs anyway, they stress.
The hospital is now collecting old no-longer-up-to-code scrubs, which will be laundered and donated to medical relief programs and assisted living facilities.
For patients, there will be helpful color decoder cards available.
