From: Meg Osterby <megosterby**At_Symbol_Here**GMAIL.COM>
Subject: Re: [DCHAS-L] Lab Coat Use
Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2018 19:23:16 -0500
Reply-To: ACS Division of Chemical Health and Safety <DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**PRINCETON.EDU>
Message-ID: CAFQuLpN=XzhrzDFBVJ6JBtZxEL+W-EzHtRVhSgyVXGe6t1zibA**At_Symbol_Here**mail.gmail.com
In-Reply-To


At Western, we went to disposable Tyvec coats the students bought, folded outside in and placed in a zippered plastic bag between labs stored in their lab drawers, and tossed as waste at the end of the semester. If the coat got too contaminated before the end of the semester, we disposed of it as waste, and purchased them a new one. The bookstore found them from some vendor at a bulk rate, and they cost the students if I remember correctly, about $10 or $15 for use the whole semester.
Got rid of the cloth ones we had been washing once a semester. Impetus for making this change was one semester when a student who had small children came in and told us that her kids had lice. So could not allow sharing of the coats until they had all been laundered

One problem I didn't anticipate was that the bio and micro bio and nursing classes also required disposable coats, and they were not flame retardant or chemically resistant, instead they were microbe resistant. Students often bought the wrong ones, or assumed since both were called lab coats that they were interchangeable. It was just a matter of returning the wrong one and getting the right one from the bookstore.

Meg Osterby

On Tue, Oct 9, 2018, 1:15 PM Shannon Nephew <millersc**At_Symbol_Here**plattsburgh.edu> wrote:
Hello,

We have recently implemented a lab coat policy and provide coats to our laboratories for student, faculty and research use. There have been some concerns about cold and flu season and students wearing the coats that students in labs before them have been sneezing or coughing into. Typically, we have the coats picked up at the end of the semester and cleaned by our vendor (they are rental coats). Faculty have mentioned getting the coats cleaned every other week, but this could be costly.
Does anyone else have alternative ways of handling this situation?
Thank you for any insight and ideas.

Shannon

Shannon C. Nephew MS, NRCC-CHO, NASP-CSM
Science Programs and Facilities Support Professional
Hudson Hall Building Manager
SUNY Plattsburgh
317 Hudson Hall
101 Broad Street
Plattsburgh, NY 12901
(518)593-9612
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