Sunday, April 19, 2009

This won't change the world

But whether you are waiting for the doctor in an exam room or laid up in a hospital, any improvement to those damn gowns is welcome.
Jeannie Norris knows. The employee of the N.C. State University Alumni Association recently spent time at Raleigh's Rex Hospital for a burst appendix.

"When you are in the hospital and had surgery, you really feel bad," said Norris, 44. "You don't pay a lot of attention to what's hooked and what's not. You find out after the fact that you've been walking around flashing people."

N.C. State is taking up the challenge of improving a gown design that has gone unchanged even as everything else in medicine has advanced rapidly.

Traci Lamar, a textile design professor at N.C. State, is leading a team that is working to create a more comfortable, less revealing hospital garment.

"They are really not only undignified and immodest, but it is influencing some behavior and some attitudes," Lamar said. "One patient literally used the word 'mortified': 'I was mortified at the thought of getting out of the bed.'"
Restoring a patients dignity is a positive step to healing. I hope they have great success in this endeavor.

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