Quotes supporting the theme “gown utility,” reflecting the functionality of the gown and impacts on health care processes and procedures and patient outcomes
| Primary stakeholder group (primary domain) | Participant quote |
|---|---|
| Patient or family member no. 1 (diagnostic imaging, surgery) | The problem is how can you do it by yourself. You have to tie these things up at the back and have your butt hang out. It’s like why they have to tie up at the back and expect you to do it yourself? It’s impossible. |
| Patient or family member no. 2 (emergency care, surgical) | I have to look for the ties and you can’t tie it. |
| Patient or family member no. 3 (bariatric) | It’s difficult to tie. I wouldn’t be able to do it myself … and there is always the fear that it will open up, right? |
| Clinician no. 1 (physician in emergency care) | A lot of people don’t know if it should go on with the ties in the front or the ties in the back. There is not a day that goes by where I am in a clinical environment that someone hasn’t got it on backward or falling off of them or it doesn’t cover them or it’s too long or short. |
| Clinician no. 2 (physiotherapist in multiple domains) | When they are not mobilizing or moving as much as they could — it actually produces a much worse outcome. |
| Clinician no. 3 (nurse in obstetrics) | The most important for our unit would be the ability to remove the gown without impacting the IVs and to be able to selectively expose body parts on the front of a patient … For our purposes, they [current gowns] are terrible — everything about them is wrong. For a labouring mother and a new mother with a baby … if we could just unbutton 1 side of the gown or 1 area of the gown as if it was designed in an intuitive way that allowed us to expose certain areas of the body, I think that would be great. |
| Clinician no. 4 (nurse in obstetrics) | One of the obstacles is that people are busy, and they don’t want to go through the whole thing of taking the IV tubing out of a pump, pulling it through the gown and everything is twisted up, and then you’ve got all these other wires and an epidural tube is taped to the gown and all this other stuff. So, I find that patients a lot of the time, if I am covering somebody for break, I will come to the room and they are wearing a dirty gown and I wonder how long it has been like that and many people say it is a pain to change so leave it. It is annoying to have to thread everything through the arm so that could be something [to consider regarding redesign]. |
| Clinician no. 5 (physiotherapist in multiple units) | I do like the fact [that gowns] are just cotton or a cotton blend that is really thin — the cotton absorbs any liquid and shows it as a stain and typically it doesn’t hide any issues that are going on where it’s covering. So, if they are fresh from surgery and the wound is bleeding or their wound packing isn’t doing what it is supposed to, you can see that really well. If they are having an incontinence issue, you can usually see that pretty easily. So, from a material thickness perspective, I like that because you can tell right away if there is any sort of other problems going on from a fluid perspective. The things that I liked were that they were really easy to remove … I found that they were really fast to get on and off … really easy to help with people who had limited arm range of motion. … Often times the gowns get dirty and I found that the current gowns are really easy to tell if they are dirty … It’s really easy to tell if they are wet and I think that’s part of the blue colour, too. If somebody had a bruise on their thigh, just from going in and glancing when they got out of bed, I could tell if it was better or worse rather than having somebody take down their pants to see those changes. So, in terms of physio assessment and measuring range of motion, I found the gown to be really easy that way and easy to move over to cover what needs to be covered. |
| Clinician no. 6 (nurse in obstetrics) | Doing an epidural … it is good to have that [back of gown] open, but I am not sure in general why the hospital gowns open at the back. |
| Clinician no. 7 (nurse in obstetrics, pediatrics) | I think the big thing for our department that makes the gown hard as well is the breastfeeding moms. After they deliver, their gowns are tied up at the back, they have to get someone to untie it and they have to pull it down, so they can breastfeed. It isn’t accessible, it doesn’t work. |
| System stakeholder no. 1 (researcher in geriatric medicine) | From a mobility perspective, I think the gowns, the way they are, are limiting mobility … Patients don’t feel as nice wearing the gowns. They don’t feel as nice getting outside the room and walking if they are half exposed. |
| System stakeholder no. 2 (laundering, repair or disposal) | Through the design process, I imagine the fastener was given a lot of thought — what led to holding onto this design of the fastener as opposed to a button or a clasp or anything else along those lines? |
| System stakeholder no. 3 (fashion and design) | I am not a big fan of Velcro because the pinch grasp that you need to open and close Velcro is usually not present in the group of patients I observed in rehab; that is a very difficult fastener to manipulate. There is that hook side of the Velcro — if it comes in contact with skin or other clothing in the laundry, if you don’t fasten it shut before you launder the garments, is also problematic because it sticks to other garments in the laundry and lint builds up in there, so I am not a big fan of Velcro, either. The challenge is what other fastener to use … using a magnetic fastener? But again, doing a loop over top of the fastener, so you can put your 2 fingers under the loop and lift rather than pinching and grasping to get the fastener open. |
| System stakeholder no. 4 (hospital leadership) | They’re confusing pieces of clothing and it’s not always clear if the opening is in the front or the opening is in the back and maybe that varies. |
Note: IV = intravenous.