Assessment of the Influence of Physicians’ Attire on Surgical Patients’ Perception. Across-Sectional Study in Aabet Hospital, AddisAbeba, Ethiopia, 2021

BACKGROUND: In Ethiopia, physicians commonly wear formal attire, surgical scrubs, casual attire, or business attire during patient care, but there is no evidence to show which attire is preferred within the patients. So this study aims to assess the influence of physicians’ attire on patients’ perceptions. METHODOLOGY: After ethical approval, a cross-sectional study was conducted with written informed consent; data were collected and checked for its completeness, later entered into SPSS version 25 for statistical analysis. Descriptive statistics was presented with frequency, percentage, tables, graphs, and texts based on the nature of the data. All the four attires were compared using the Friedman test and pair wise comparisons were conducted with Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons, and Mann–Whitney U-test was used to know the preferred attire on patients’ perception about physicians’ skill, with 95% confidence and a p-value of less than 0.05 were considered as statistically significant. RESULTS: In this study, out of the total respondents 66.7% are males and 71.9%, 50.3% of the respondents were degree or diploma holders, and aged 18–34 years respectively. Among participants’ 77.1% and 55.9% preferred formal attire and surgical scrub respectively. For male surgeons, formal attire and surgical scrub have an equal preference in surgical patients (p<0.001), but business and casual attire have no statistically significant difference. The patients’ preference in male formal physician attire in surgeon’s confidence, willingness to discuss confidential information and safeties of the surgeon were 76.2%, 75.7%, and 70.5% respectively, and for female surgeons, formal attire on surgical patients’ confidence in the surgeon, safety, and willingness to discuss confidential information were 74.9%, 73.8%, and 71.8% respectively. CONCLUSION: Physician attire is one of the important factors that inspire surgical patient confidence, smartness, surgical skill, discussion of confidential information, and caring ability in physicians. Formal attire and surgical scrub were the most preferred physician’s outfits.