A recent story of a dress code policy impacting Ottawa nurses has me thinking about planning again. In short, a hospital implemented a new dress code designed to make it easier for patients to identify nurses from other hospital staff. Nurses can no longer wear scrubs with cartoon characters or other “drawings” on them. In addition, nurses must wear white lab coats when outside their usual units.

Every hospital has a dress code policy, and numerous institutions have strict policies about scrub prints, colors, etc. I know of many hospitals that also require nurses (and others) to wear white lab coats throughout the hospital. Differentiating nurses from everyone else is a common problem since basically everyone – from the environmental services team to the neurosurgeon – wear scrubs. In order to serve patients better and help them identify nurses more easily, some hospitals mandate specific scrub colors for various professions (nurses wear blue, nurse aides wear purple, respiratory wears green, etc.) or make credentials more prominent on name tags.

The Ottawa nurses are upset because they do not like the white lab coats and want to be able to wear cheerful colors and prints “for [their] patients.” According to the article, “[t]he policy was developed and implemented by the hospital’s human resources and executive teams,” which I am guessing includes only one or two nurses who are removed from direct care. From my limited perspective (since everything I know about this situation is from an article), it seems the hospital’s dress code plan is admirable – attempting to make nursing identification easier for patients, thus improving care and patient satisfaction. However, I think the hospitals approach to the plan could have been better by involving more direct care nurses. And by “more” I mean more than 5 or 10 nurses, more like engaging at least 20% of the direct care workforce in the policy development in some way.

No, no matter what the hospital would have done, not everyone would have been happy. You cannot please everyone at the same time, but the hospital could have avoided the backlash and now low morale (which will impact productivity and possibly even patient satisfaction scores) by making those impacted by the plan part of the planning. Hopefully the hospital can find a win-win-win for itself, its workforce, and its consumers. A great way to start, in my opinion, is to bring nurses on board to work on the plan now. Most of us recognize by now that nurses are great problem solvers. I’m sure they can help solve this one, too.