Funny Healthcare Shirts for Everyone in the Hospital Who Is Not a Nurse

Walk into any hospital and you will spot a funny shirt on a nurse within thirty seconds. Nurses have an entire genre, and they have earned it. But a hospital runs on hundreds of other people, and most of them have been standing next to that nurse shirt for years, quietly waiting for one of their own.

Funny healthcare shirts beyond the nurses' station

The best funny healthcare shirts are written for one job at a time, because every corner of the building has its own jokes, its own vocabulary and its own private suffering:

• Phlebotomists assess every arm in the room, including at weddings and in the checkout line. They cannot turn it off.
• Dental teams ask open-ended questions of people with three instruments in their mouth, and understand every answer.
• Pharmacists decode handwriting that would defeat a code breaker, then explain on the phone that the prescription sent four minutes ago is not ready yet.
• Radiology techs say "hold still" more often than any humans alive, and see right through everyone, professionally.
• Respiratory therapists have heard "you take my breath away" from every patient who was awake enough to say it.
• Lab techs know things about you before your doctor does, and they will never tell.

For the person who goes looking for veins

For phlebotomists, and for anyone who has ever stared at a stranger's forearm on a bus, Look at That Beautiful Vein, Please Let Me Poke It says the quiet part in a small, polite serif on charcoal.

The joke is the politeness. It is a request, nicely worded, from someone who has already made up their mind. Anyone who has had blood drawn by a good phlebotomist knows the moment: a gentle tap, a hum of approval, a look of pure professional joy. "Oh, you have great veins." Nobody outside healthcare has ever received a compliment that unsettling and that sincere at the same time.

The dental office lineup

The dental team gets a whole cast of characters: the Dentist Teeth and Brush tee lines up a little round mirror, a green tube, a toothbrush and two cheerful teeth, all smiling, on a washed charcoal Comfort Colors shirt.

It is a friendly shirt for a profession that spends all day with people who are nervous to see them. Kids point at it. Adults unclench a little. Somebody always asks where the floss is, and the answer is that the floss was too shy to be in the picture. It works for dentists, hygienists, assistants and the front desk, which is the team that calls about the cleaning you have been avoiding since spring.

Rules for a good healthcare joke

• The joke is on the job, never the patient. A shirt that mocks people who are sick or scared is not funny in a waiting room.
• Insiders first. A good healthcare shirt makes a colleague laugh and a patient smile, in that order.
• Keep it clean enough for the hallway. Most of these shirts get worn on days off, but some end up under a lab coat on a casual Friday, and children read everything.

Nurses, we have not forgotten you. There is a whole post on what makes funny nurse shirts funny, and our nurse collection is bigger than everyone else's combined, which we suspect the phlebotomists have noticed.

Gifts for the whole team

Hospital Week, Lab Week, and Dental Hygiene Month, which happens to be October, all deserve something better than another branded pen. Our dentist collection and nurse collection are a good place to start. Pick the one that makes a coworker laugh before the first patient of the day.