The National Naval Medical Center encourages staff members to ensure they are prepared for their daily tasks, wear proper personal protective gear and putting safety first.

Hospital Corpsman 1st Class (FMF) Matthew Thompson, assistant leading petty officer for the main operating rooms, explains how proper wear of organizational clothing helps patients and staff stay safe.

‘‘Generally [lab coats] are a barrier of protection when you’re walking around the hospital,” Thompson said. ‘‘We’re also responsible to change out our shoes when we walk out [the operating rooms]. We don’t want to track anything outside in or inside out.”

Thomas Watts, executive chef for Guest Services and the Main Street CafÈ believes uniform appearance can affect how staff and patients perceive an individual and company.

‘‘If you walk into the cafÈ and see that all of the employees are wearing the same uniform ... they are all wearing gloves and changing gloves often and you can see that their own standards of hygiene are at a high level,” Watt said. ‘‘It automatically shows the customer that we have high standards of sanitation and that our uniforms are a major part of that.”

Different uniforms are used in patient care and food services. Each has its own guidelines for how it should be worn.

‘‘A lot of people outside of the operating room don’t wear [scrubs] as a uniform item. This is a military facility and should be represented in a military fashion,” Thompson said. ‘‘There are times when you see people with stains [on lab coats] and it doesn’t represent [the hospital] well to the patient who is seeing us walk around the hospital with large coffee stains or dirty lab coats.”

NNMC Instruction (1020.8B) states the standards and wearing military uniforms properly. The instruction clarifies how uniform articles are worn, where they can be worn and laundering of uniform articles. These rules apply to all personnel onboard, attached to or employed by the command or tenant activities.

‘‘Are we following the proper practices for representing the hospital?” asked Khin Aungthein, U.S. Navy Joint Commission fellow department head. ‘‘We need to wear the proper uniform, whatever it may be, whether a civilian employee or active duty military, that can set good professionalism.”

When asked how important appearance is to doing a job, Thompson said that it can determine what a patient thinks of the hospital staff.

‘‘[Patients] want to see that representation of cleanliness and also the military side of being in a hospital and we need to represent ourselves that way,” Thompson said. ‘‘When you think of a hospital, you want to think of cleanliness and this is where you go to get healthy and get away from germs.”

Watts said that the way food service people look will determine if customers want to eat the foods they serve.

‘‘If you walk in and see two employees are wearing different colored shirts and one has a stain from their waist to chest, it makes you wonder what has that person done before putting their hands in my food,” Watts said.

Aungthein, who works for the Quality Management Department at NNMC, said that infection control extends to grooming standards.

‘‘If you’re in patient care areas, you should not be wearing acrylic finger nails,” she said. ‘‘Those are not your finger nails. If you’re not wearing [acrylic nails], yours should not extend more than a quarter inch beyond your nail bed. These are good infection prevention practices that we encourage people to follow.”

Below are examples from NNMC instruction for organizational clothing: