The Answer to Patient Gowns?

    No, the photo at left is not the answer (although its length has some appeal.) I know this isn't the answer because I spent ten years trying to solve the problem of patient gowns with new designs. As President & CEO of Riverside Methodist Hospital and the OhioHealth System in Columbus, I even hired a part time staff person to create a better solution.
   We came up with some incremental improvements. But a nagging problem remained. No matter what design we came up with, there was still the issue of how patients felt wearing one of these strange garments which, in turn, was based on how they were treated!
   No one wants to be a patient. No one says on Saturday night, "Hey, I know what would be fun. Let's check into the hospital."

   As I have been saying for thirty years, the experience of hospitalization is far more humiliating than it needs to be. In fact, hospitalization still bears too much resemblance to another form of institutionalization - imprisonment. But there is an answer to the patient gown problem...

   And the answer has to do not with gown design, but with the culture of health care. Sick people are diminished by illness or injury. So long as they have their regular clothes on, they are often able to hold on to a modicum of dignity. But take our clothes away and put us in a gown that marks us as sick and respect from others will often sink - no matter how nice the gown is.
   Consider prison uniforms. Unlike a patient gown, prison uniforms cover the wearer quite well. But an orange uniform (or a striped one) with a number across it signals that I am a criminal. For some, this provides an excuse to look down on another human being. Raise the idea that prisoners should be treated respectfully as humans and the likely response from many will be: "No, prisoners should to be treated disrespectfully."
   As a former federal prosecutor and judge, I believe that dangerous prisoners deserve to be walled off from society. But, beyond that, they have not been sentenced to be treated as subhuman.

   Whenever we degrade another human being or another group we degrade ourselves.

   What about patients? What have they done to deserve a humiliating garment branding them as weakened, vulnerable, and (as in the photo) exposed? They have simply fallen ill. Their weakness and vulnerablity should entitle them to our highest level of respect and caring not subconsious scorn. Patient gowns should be viewed as robes of suffering calling us to give an extra measure of compassion and love to the wearer.
   I'll admit that some design improvement might help. A courageous leader named Rosemary Gibson, a member of the staff at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has taken on the project of improving patient garb. When she started the effort more than three years ago, I wasn't very encouraging to her. I gave her all the devil's advocate arguments I could think of. To her credit, she has persisted. God bless her if she suceeeds and I admire her for even trying.
   Meanwhile, a hospital, clinic, hospice, nursing home or doctor's office can change patterns of disrespect by developing cultures that display the deepest regard toward the sick.
   In an effort to humiliate him, Jesus' captors stripped away his clothes, dressed him in the humblest and most limited cloth, and mocked him with a crown made of thorns. In this humiliating garb, nailed to a cross, taunted by onlookers, he founded a faith based on love.
   People of all faiths respect the image of Christ on the cross. People of all faiths and of no faith say they believe in love. For caregivers, it's time to change our mental image of people in patient gowns. It's time for patient gowns to be seen as robes of respect.