A Somerset hospital put name badges on surgeons' theatre hats

Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton began putting name and role badges on doctors' theatre hats in 2025. The design came from Danielle Checketts, a former medical professional who runs hospital clothing company Eco Ninjas, after she kept being misidentified — including as patients — while in scrubs during her surgeon training.

The problem is structural. In operating theatres, staff are 'sterile, essentially from the neck down' once scrubbed, so chest badges are out; people wearing lead aprons for X-rays and fluoroscopy cannot wear a normal badge either. And patients are in no position to check a lanyard: as orthopaedic consultant Andy Stevenson put it, you are lying on your back, all you can see is heads and shoulders, and lots of people are doing things to you.

The fix moves identification to the only exempt surface. 'The easiest way to visibly identify anybody is just glancing above the eyes to their name and role on their theatre hat,' Checketts said. The hospital reported that patients found the hats beneficial and comforting, that communication improved, and that it was looking at rolling the scheme out to more sites with operating theatres, including Minehead and West Mendip.

Sterility and radiation rules could not be relaxed, so the solution had to live outside them rather than fight them.

A patient's line of sight in theatre is fixed — hats sit exactly in it.

Role visibility helps staff too: students, part-timers and scrubbed colleagues all become nameable at a glance.

When a hard rule removes the standard solution, find the one surface the rule doesn't reach — it is usually the surface everyone is already looking at.

Somerset NHS Foundation Trust said it was exploring rolling the hats out across its other theatre sites, including Minehead and West Mendip; no quantitative results are reported in the source.