Your employees make indelible impressions on every patient who walks in your door. Patients take note of your staff’s smiles, tone of voice and comments. While all of that is critical to making a good impression, the most important image is what patients see and feel about your practice when they first walk in the door.
Although pink hair, a nose ring, two-inch designer nails or an expanse of ‘tooth jewelry’ may be considered glamorous by some, your first concern should be professional dress that is appropriate for all of your patients.
Your practice may never have to deal with an employee who comes to work with a small sword pierced under her bottom lip or with gold dental work that spells “phat” affixed to her front teeth, but that’s no reason not to be ready. Develop a dress code that sets your expectation for professional dress. The code can also specify your expectations for hair styles, body piercing, length of nails, etc. Because you can’t anticipate every situation, however, leave yourself room to identify and take action on dress you deem unprofessional.
Consider also addressing body odor and perfume, both of which can be unprofessional, not to mention obnoxious to coworkers and patients.
If you don’t know where to start in writing a dress code, ask your local hospital for its employee dress code. See a sample business casual dress code and find additional tips on About.com’s human resources http://humanresources.about.com/od/workrelationships/a/dress_code.htm pages.
Read more about dress codes
For a sample dress code policy for medical practices, as well as hundreds of other policies, check out the book that I co-authored, Operating Policies and Procedures for Medical Practices. http://www5.mgma.com/ecom/Default.aspx?action=INVProductDetails&args=1089&tabid=138

Does your practice have a dress code?