This costume drama creates a 'them' and 'us' scenario

Who loves a man in a uniform these days? Well, astonishingly, some residential homes looking after older people do. To be fair, there are some justifications for this. They ensure that people don't wear daft clothes to work - such as high heels, raggedy-arsed jeans or bared midriffs. It's argued that uniforms help people who have orientation problems to identify people they can turn to for help. And residential work can be hard on clothes, frequently involving more contact with other people's bodily fluids than planned for, so there is a strong case for uniforms in nursing homes.

What residential worker has not suffered the dawning realisation that they have sat in a chair that someone has inadvertently peed on and they are going to have to walk round for the rest of the shift in clothes damp with someone else's cold wee?

Nonetheless, my personal view is that uniforms are a complete bust. It was distinctly liberating when, as a manager of a home for the first time, I stopped relying on a uniform and tie and went into work in the clothes I normally wore. Given that it was the 1980s, this involved broad-brimmed hats, floral waistcoats, a long dangly earring, and trousers so baggy they looked as if I had stolen them from the circus.

However much of a prat I looked, I immediately felt much more comfortable and relaxed. Staff took a cue, and an increasingly relaxed attitude, too. Establishing yourself as familiar happens automatically. If you go for a fairly consistent approach to clothes, residents with dementia recognise you anyway, even if they struggle with your name or what you do. You didn't need a white coat to be someone they'd approach for help. Relaxed colours were good, too: dressing in blues and browns gave you an air of calm that genuinely rubbed off on the atmosphere of a shift.

There may be an element of personal bias here. Since school and Scout days, I've always hated wearing uniforms - but then so do most people. If the managers in organisations who impose uniforms on staff had to wear them, we'd surely see considerably less of them.

There is an unpleasant power imbalance involved. Most people find uniforms institutional and intimidating to some degree. When working in a psychiatric hospital, I used to occasionally play chess with a county-level player who happened to be a patient. He was significantly better than I was. I noticed that he beat me like a gong if I sat down and played him out of work time in my ordinary clothes. But if I had my ghastly nurse's white coat on, it was another matter and he lost on a regular basis. That taught me a clear lesson.

The main objection to uniforms, however, is surely more basic even than that. Uniforms are designed to make a distinction between "us" and "them" that nobody should ever encourage in a residential environment. Living with residents as equals is what distinguishes a good home from a bad one. Wearing uniforms marking staff out as different is a step down that ghastly road that continues with separate staff cutlery, separate staff dining spaces, even (and persistently to this day, God help us) separate staff toilets to prevent staff being somehow sullied by indirect contact with those we are caring for. That is just ridiculous and horrible. If a toilet is not fit for the staff to use, it is plainly not fit for the residents either.

Refusing uniforms is a step away from all that. I would argue that it makes staff think more about how residents feel about what they wear, too. I knew a lot of people with quite severe dementias who were extremely particular about their appearance and what they wore. They enjoyed being complimented on their appearance, and being surrounded by staff in their own clothes gave them a chance to compliment staff back.

Not that I got many compliments myself in the 80s, despite the trousers or the dangly earring. Funny, that.

· Christopher Manthorp is director of older people's services for Epic, part of the Circle Anglia Group. He is writing in a personal capacity.

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