Author(s) :

Aanya Kancherla.

Volume/Issue :

Abstract :

Hospital gowns are a common part of medical care, but many patients say that traditional designs can reduce comfort, dignity, and confidence during hospital stays. Standard gowns, which usually have an open back and are made from thin, inexpensive fabric, focus on making clinical access easier rather than supporting the patient’s experience. This tradeoff may have a greater impact on adolescents, who are at a stage where they often pay more attention to appearance, privacy, and how others perceive them than other groups of patients. This study focused on whether feedback from adolescents could help guide the redesign of a hospital gown that would be seen as more comfortable, secure, and supportive of confidence than the customary design. The study used a sequential exploratory mixed-methods approach, including repeated user-centered prototyping. Adolescents in the Dallas-Fort Worth area first reviewed a standard hospital gown, responding to Likert-scale questions and open-ended prompts. The initial group included 15 hospitalized adolescent patients (ages 10-18) and 15 healthy student volunteers (ages 15-18). Feedback from this first phase was used to create two versions of a new gown, which had a fully secured Velcro back closure and long sleeves with removable Velcro panels for medical access. Since it would not have been ethical to test the new gown on hospitalized patients, only the 14 student volunteers who took part in both phases evaluated the redesigned gown. When compared to ratings for the standard gown, the new gown received much higher scores for comfort (3.40 vs. 4.29), coverage (2.60 vs. 4.07), and confidence (2.30 vs. 4.21; independent-samples t-tests, all p < .01). A matched-pairs comparison limited to the 14 students who completed both phases showed the same results (all p < .01). These results indicate that design changes based on adolescent feedback were positively received by a healthy peer group. However, since hospitalized patients did not review the redesigned gown, these results should not yet be applied to the experience of patients in the hospital.