Exposed to new designs

Fashion designer Ben de Lisi, best known for his red carpet frocks, has designed a hospital gown. Irish designers share their views on whether a similar idea would work here

THE MAKEOVER has reached pandemic proportions. The humble hospital gown with its open back and ties is to have a reality TV-style makeover. Under the tutelage of fashion designer Ben de Lisi, the ugly duckling garment is about to become a swan.

American-born de Lisi, renowned for his red carpet frocks and his role as a judge on the reality television show, Project Catwalk, has been tasked with the gown's redesign.

The makeover is part of a project entitled Design for Patient Dignity, commissioned by the British Design Council which has teamed up with the UK's Department of Health to offer fresh and aesthetically pleasing ideas for patient care.

De Lisi’s brief is “to design a range of functional patient clothes that significantly reduce the risk of physical exposure, cater for differences in patient size and are appropriate for a range of activities including sleeping, resting, journeys to and from the toilet/bath-room and leaving the ward”.

De Lisi’s designs will include a gown, pyjama bottoms, a polar fleece wrap and slippers and are due to be unveiled next Tuesday.

While the idea is innovative, in reality it is aspirational in what it hopes to deliver. So, what do healthcare workers here think?

“The perception of people working in the health service is that anything that improves the dignity of the patient is a good thing. It helps them to get better,” says Louise O’Reilly, the national nursing official at Siptu.

Given the opportunity, what would Ireland’s fashion folk suggest as alternatives to the current hospital staple?

London-based fashion designer Paul Costelloe believes the gown should remain very simple in shape as one size has to fit all. He suggests separates. “It could be braver in its choice of colour too,” he adds. “Colour is something that might help distract a patient and offer some feel-good factor,” he says, listing bright colours rather than the pale green currently in use.

“I would recommend collegiate blue and white stripes for the men and florals for the ladies – a soft watercolour type of print rather like what I’m using in my SS11 collection.”

In a perfect world, patients would be allowed to choose from a wardrobe of various cuts and colours, according to Donegal-born handbag designer and one-time architecture student Pauric Sweeney. “This would also make use of colour as therapy.”

Gowns should also be designed with an eye to the practical, is another of his prescriptive measures. “One utilitarian idea is a pocket for your iPod.”

These ideas may seem trivial at a time when the health service is strained to bursting point but they do form part of new schools of thought on hospital design, admits Sean Mahon, architect and managing director of O’Connell Mahon, one of the three firms co-operating on the design of the new national paediatric hospital (NPT).

“It is accepted that a well-designed environment can improve patient wellbeing and evidence to that effect is starting to emerge,” he explains.

It is this best practice that will be utilised in the look and feel of the NPT, which is almost at the end of its concept design stage. The plan includes single rooms for patients. The furniture design and equipment ideas are still in development.

“One of the big issues in gown design for children is the creation of age-appropriate clothing,” Mahon continues. They will, literally, have to cover everyone from infants to adolescents.

To date, the role of the hospital gown has been to control infection, says Mahon. “It hasn’t been considered in terms of a patient’s dignity.”

Pauric Sweeney recommends a T-shirt printing service where you could have your favourite band printed on your gown thus allowing you “to express your individuality in a standardised way”. Medical tools such as the stethoscope could also be used as a print motif on the garment. These could work really well in a children’s hospital.

While Louise O’Reilly likes the designers’ theories, she would have a “jaundiced political view” if they were to become a reality.

“If the Minister for Health, Mary Harney, came out and approved such an idea in the morning, alarm bells would be ringing inside my head. With a health service in crisis I would worry that this idea of patient dignity through design is nothing more than smoke and mirrors – a distraction,” she adds.

Will dignity and designer labels ever become de rigeurin recovery rooms?

“While I’m all for anything that improves dignity for patients, in Ireland we’re a long way from a project like that.”

Keeping your dignity intact by not laying your bits bare is all very well, she admits. “But before we ask Philip Treacy or Lainey Keogh to knit us a gown we should consider the greatest patient indignity of all, which is to sit in a chair for hours and then to lie on a trolley for days – in inappropriate locations with not even a curtain for cover.

“Healthcare is a right not a privilege.”

De Lisi’s designs can be viewed on designcouncil.org.uk from Tuesday, March 23rd