A fashion for uniformity

I completely agree with Dr Spence. As a final year medical student undergoing clinical training, it is important and mandatory to visit a number of different teaching and district general hospitals for placements and teaching sessions. You attend multitudes of different clinical environments. Starting out my clinical years, the vast range of colours worn by staff, clinical or non clinical, always secretly amazed me. A placement in one hospital, on a particular ward would entail between four and seven weeks of getting involved in that particular field and the daily experiences it offers. It is hard as a student rotating around frequently in this way to get to know colleagues across the healthcare team; it is also contrastingly hard for the staff on the wards to keep a track of all the different students they meet and work with. Due to these challenges, it is often easier for all involved to forget formal introductions. They are sometimes time consuming, confusing, and ultimately often unnecessary. But avoiding introductions for ease of life is a tact that I’m sure the majority would not advocate.

My response is about making life easier for everyone involved. Uniforms are a great idea – but they also can be very confusing for the visiting medical student, and also more importantly the often transferred, often institutionalised and sometimes confused patient. Moving from one hospital to another every month or so has made me really appreciate how many different members of the healthcare team work on a daily basis on wards, and how many different uniforms there are – with a complete lack of continuity.

I have often been mistaken for a junior doctor on the wards - an easy mistake, as my attire would roughly match that of a doctor. I have wandered hospital corridors trying to figure out what colours mean what (without looking at the particular tools that person is using) and trying to second-guess their role. It is harder than one would think. Never mind that as a student, textbooks and lectures don’t cover problems encountered such as job descriptions for each member of the healthcare team. I have often asked non-clinical staff about clinical issues. Then once you have learnt each member of staffs name, their role, their ‘work ethic’, you move onto another placement, another hospital, where the ‘costumes’ are all mixed around.

Although not a particularly high priority issue in the NHS, a simple intervention, such as a national uniform colour scheme as is the case now in NHS Scotland, would be greatly beneficial for all. With a scheme such as this, patients, visitors and placed students would hardly ever ask a question of someone who couldn’t give us an answer; we would all feel comfortable in the absence of introductions. Of course, this type of scheme does run in some Trusts and hospitals but why in such a secluded way and not nationwide or UK-wide? This also broaches the proposition of all doctors wearing scrubs – a separate debate, but one which I would favour.