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| Dr Tweetie Pie |
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Vienna (pte022/22.10.2012/14:30) - Pediatricians should drop the white doctors' coats and wear T-shirts with cartoon characters instead according to a study carried out at the Medi-Uni Graz in Austria and published in Acta Paediatrica. Doctors were alternately asked to wear three different clothing types while dealing with child patients, the traditional white lab coat with a shirt and tie, or a smart white polo T-shirt and finally a dark blue casual T-shirt complete with the cartoon character Tweetie Pie.
One hundred and seven children and 72 parents were visited by the paediatrician randomly wearing one of the three different outfits (casual, semiformal, formal) during their hospital stay. To her surprise Julia Hofmann, who carried out the study for her doctorate degree, found that the doctor with the casual clothing was not only more popular with the kids, but also with the parents.
She said: "There were two aims of the project, to find out what clothing the children preferred on their doctors, and also to see which style installed the most professional trust in parents." Parents were questioned after each visit, and she said: "The most interesting thing is that the doctor wearing a T-shirt with a cartoon character did not result in a loss of trust among parents." Using a 'likert scale', the casual outfit received the best mark by 95.5% of parents (58.3% in the semiformal, 30.8% in the formal group). The degree of the parents' trust in the paediatrician was comparable in all three groups. And the vast majority - 75 per cent - were in favour of the doctors wearing more colourful clothing.
For the children a third of the kids aged between 6 and 18 said they preferred the cartoon character look with a 100 per cent in favour, whereas for children under 6 the clothing the doctor wore was regarded as irrelevant. In conclusion author Hofmann said that it was clear that "parents do not only tolerate a casual outfit, they even prefer it without any loss of trust. The same holds true for children between 6 and 18 years. For younger children, the paediatricians' outfit seems to play no major role."
The study will reignite debate about the doctor's choice of clothing after the American Medical Association agreed there was a need to reconsider whether doctors' wore their iconic white lab coats, citing evidence that the garment contributes to the spread of infection.
Several studies have shown that the coats harbour potentially harmful bacteria. It is also blamed for "white coat hypertension", the name given to the very common condition occurring in up to 20% of patients in which a person's blood pressure is abnormally elevated when it is measured in the doctor's office, but is within the normal range the rest of the time. White coat hypertension is usually attributed to the anxiety which one often experiences when in a doctor's office.
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