A novel method for reducing confusion in hospital corridors

Jeffrey Silverman brings timely attention to the problem that hospital patients have in identifying the multitude of people they encounter in a hospital. A recent study at the Vancouver Hospital and Health Sciences Centre revealed that during a stay of average length, a patient will be looked after by 50 to 60 people in a wide variety of professional disciplines and staff categories. Silverman's suggestion of colour coding lab coats should certainly be taken seriously and widely discussed, but there are some major stumbling blocks.

He acknowledges the difficulties colour-blind patients would face, but even those with normal vision would require a very keen eye indeed to distinguish the multiple shades that would be necessary to represent the 13 major specialty departments and 41 subspecialty divisions found in a large hospital. The colour decoder that would need to be posted on the walls of all units and corridors would be extremely difficult to interpret. It would need many nuances to differentiate all of them: perhaps misty rose pink for female obstetricians, with shocking pink reserved for psychiatrists who perform ECT, black for pathologists, and so on.

However, a logical extension of Silverman's proposal would solve the problem perfectly. Rather than having distinctively coloured coats, it would be much more declarative and easily understood by patients to have the white coat clearly marked with appropriate emblems of the wearer's specialty. An exhaustive list would require the Medical Advisory Committee to put forward recommendations, but the typical surgical personality would go for this sort of branding big time and the mind boggles over the wide range of anatomical options available. For the cardiologist, it would be tastefully stylized hearts in bright red. Radiologists should have an x-rated design of one kind or another. For the pathologist, a skull-and-crossbones motif would immediately convey the proper message. In this age of political correctness gynecologists and the urologists would present a serious problem, but I have no doubt that their fertile medical minds could come up with a bottomless list of possibilities.

An analysis of the cost of bringing these changes about in Canada's hospitals could easily be designed by Silverman and me, probably at a cost of no more than a million dollars or so. I am certain that Human Resources Development Canada would fund the project without asking too many questions.