Hospital attire evolves
Nurse Abel sticks with profession’s
traditional uniform
By PAT MURPHY
Express Staff Writer
Grace Abel doesn’t dodge the question or
hem and haw when asked about her nurse’s uniform.
"I’m just old-fashioned," she says without
pause, but with a smile suggesting she feels right at home with her reason.
Grace Abel, left, discusses a
medical chart with Gordon Wait at St. Luke’s Wood River Medical Center.
Express photo by Willy Cook
Of all the nurses at St. Luke’s Wood River
Medical Center, only Abel, 62, still wears what might be called a traditional
nurse’s uniform from days of yore.
It’s an all white dress, knee length white
stockings, white shoes, and a nurse’s cardboard-stiff white cap with a black
stripe.
For nurse Abel—who’s kept up with the
times in medicine with continuing education in such techniques as trauma
support, life support and pediatrics—it’s a matter of maintaining a tradition
she accepted 40 years ago when she graduated from St. Joseph’s School of Nursing
in Denver.
In those days, she recalls, student nurses
were required to wear starched uniforms so stiff they literally could be stood
up in a corner. The dress she now wears is a softer material that she doesn’t
have starched.
Another graduation tradition was to "cap"
each student–that is, they were given white, usually folded caps with striping
that signified what college degrees a nurse held. Some cap styles also signified
different nursing schools.
Now, times have changed for nursing.
Starched white dresses are out. So-called
"scrubs--unisex tops and pants bottoms, many with colorful wild flower
print--are in.
Abel concedes that because more men are in
nursing, dresses obviously don’t suit them. Plus, scrubs pants often make
activities around a ward or operating room easier physically.
As a practical matter, Abel says fewer and
fewer stores offer traditional nurse uniforms.
As if to confirm her judgment about
tradition, Abel says three or four times a week patients at St. Luke’s stop her
to say, "It’s so nice to see a nurse who looks like a nurse."
Says Abel:
"Going to ‘scrubs’ you give up dignity"
associated with a nurse’s traditional uniform.
The novelty of her attire is a source of
collegiality with other St. Luke’s nurses. On her 50th birthday, other nurses
showed up at a party in traditional caps, partly as a humorous gesture, but
mostly as a tribute to nurse Abel’s steadfast observance of tradition.
Abel has seen other changes in nursing
since she first showed up in Sun Valley in 1965 and lived in nurses’ quarters on
the third floor of the Sun Valley Lodge.
Nurses are now better prepared. Most
attend schools associated with hospitals where they can be at the bedsides of
patients as part of their learning. Technological and pharmaceutical advances in
surgery and patient care also have improved the work of nurses.
But, like the experience of so many other
institutions, hospital paperwork has become a major distraction from patient
care.
Retirement?
Not quite yet.
Ironically, Abel says she’ll continue to
work but she can’t afford the costs of health care in retirement.