Health care uniforms

Health care uniforms depend largely on the type of care you give, where you work and the dress code of your facility. You may be required to wear scrubs, or have a more casual uniform.

Types of health care uniforms

Even within a hospital setting, you may come across tons of different uniforms. Health care uniforms are used to distinguish between specialities and departments. Making it easy to identify staff. You may even find different uniforms in the same profession, dependant on where you work!

Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals has a handy visual to identify some of their healthcare professionals by their uniforms. Take a look at this here. Below are just a few examples of different health care uniforms.

Nurses

Typically, nurses wear basic scrubs. Or they may wear tunics, which look like long shirts or dresses. The title of the nurse will depend on their uniform. A specialist nurse will have a different uniform to a student nurse for example.

A private hospital may have a different colour or style of uniform to an NHS hospital, even if they do the same role.

Health care assistants (HCAs)

Health care assistant’s work with patients as well as aid the medical staff. They often wear a similar style tunic to nurses, but usually in a different colour. Tunics are commonly white, pale blue, or green, but could be any colour.

Alternatively, many wear simple plain clothing where uniform isn’t required.

Midwives

Similarly to the previous uniforms, midwives wear a tunic style uniform which is usually in some shade of blue, particularly mid to dark blue. This will differ in the specialities of the midwives.

The tunics may be longer than worn in traditional nursing, with plenty of pockets and an open collar.

Radiographers

Typically radiographers and students will wear a tunic with elbow length sleeves, and trousers. The tunics may have a different colour piping or patch to indicate the position, e.g. radiographer, assistant and student.

Tunics are worn across all areas of healthcare and the colour or style is the element which distinguishes professions.