How you dress affects professional image

As a retired community pharmacist who used to own my own pharmacies, it was important to me that all staff looked clean, presentable and wore an overall. Any male managers would wear a clean white lab coat or smart business suit that clearly showed him to be a man of competence and authority and the person in charge. The female managers normally chose to wear a white coat and all staff wore smart, similar designed overalls.

Today, in the supermarkets where I shop, in the pharmacy department there is often no real indication who the pharmacist is and most of the staff wear black and often grubby fleece jackets. Surely this is not the image pharmacy should be promoting, but nowadays is there anything that makes ‘retail pharmacy’ more professional in the public eye?

John Williams

Aylesbury,

Buckinghamshire