Customized patient clothing and patient satisfaction.

Abstract

Purpose: To respect the patients' physical privacy, they should be provided with proper clothing that prevents the exposure of unnecessary parts of the body. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate patient satisfaction upon wearing customized, high-coverage, procedure-specific dresses.

Design/methodology/approach: New designs of clothing adapted for different kinds of procedures, and offering a good coverage of the body and easy access to the required parts were compared with regular patient clothing. Patients from six different wards of a university hospital filled out a questionnaire inquiring about general and demographic variables, and patient satisfaction was evaluated based on six main features of the clothing design. p<0.005 was considered as the level of statistical significance.

Findings: Overall, 256 patients were entered into the regular-design and new-design groups (n=128 in each). In Group 1 (regular design), the rate of dissatisfaction was about 98, 84, 84, 78, 77 and 38 percent for ease of wearing, comfort, design, material, coverage level and size, respectively. In Group 2 (new design), the highest satisfaction rates were associated with ease of wearing, size, coverage level, material, design and comfort as 93.7, 91.4, 89.9, 87.1, 86, and 80.5 percent, respectively.

Originality/value: The present study is the first to investigate customized patient clothing and demonstrated that these clothes can improve the patients' satisfaction in terms of coverage, comfort, design and size.