Volunteering at hospitals moves beyond candy stripers
Whatever happened to candy stripers? From roughly the 1950s until the early ’90s, high school girls who were interested in nursing could don a pink-and-whitestriped pinafore and volunteer at a hospital, doing chores such as fetching ice water for patients, delivering flowers or working in the gift shop.
Candy stripers were so much part of the zeitgeist they showed up on episodes of “Patty Duke” and “Laverne and Shirley” (wherein Shirley wants to marry a doctor despite having just been assaulted by one in the supply closet). Even Barbie had a candy striper outfit, complete with a tiny hot water bottle and plastic watermelon.
But as more boys got interested in nursing and the service organizations — called auxiliaries — that often sponsored candy striping programs died out, hospitals began converting them into volunteer programs for all genders.
Today, candy stripers are virtually extinct except on TV shows such as “Pretty Little Liars” and “Code Black,” which seem oblivious to their real-life disappearance.
Costume shops sell seductive versions of the uniform for adults. Every October, Google searches for “candy striper” and “candy striper costume” spike. On “Sex and the City,” Carrie Bradshaw dressed up like one to cheer up her boyfriend after heart surgery.
Today, teen hospital volunteers typically wear polo shirts or jackets in green, blue or purple. About 20 percent are boys.
Last year 11 percent of registered nurses were men, up from less than 3 percent in 1970.
Then as now, volunteers are not allowed to do hands-on care but do interact with patients.
“The patients love someone who is not there to poke them with a needle or make them do something they don’t want to do,” said Marianne Jones, manager of volunteer services at Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City, part of Dignity Health.
The big difference is that volunteers now typically must go through training on health care privacy laws, data security and sexual harassment.
Demand for volunteer positions has grown so large — it looks good on college applications and some schools require it of health care majors — that some Bay Area hospitals have waiting lists.
Candy striping helped many girls decide whether they wanted, or didn’t want, a career in health care. Julie Miller-Phipps, president of Kaiser Permanente Southern California, was a candy striper. So was Janet Wagner, CEO of Mills-Peninsula Health Services.
Working as a candy striper for four years at Peninsula Hospital in the 1980s helped Christina Sullivan decide not to pursue nursing.
“I didn’t want the blood and guts,” she said.
Instead she went into physical therapy and is now a volunteer program coordinator at the same hospital, now part of Sutter Health’s MillsPeninsula Medical Center.
Her boss, Erik Mindermann, was denied that opportunity. As a student at Mills High School in Millbrae in the mid-’80s, Mindermann wanted to join Peninsula Hospital’s candy striper program.
“My brother’s very cool girlfriend was a candy striper,” he said. “Every day on my way to high school I walked across the (Peninsula) campus. I saw all of these great people volunteering.”
But boys were not allowed.
“It’s really tragic,” he said. “I absolutely wanted a career in health care. I know if I had an opportunity to volunteer as a high school student, certainly my academic career would have changed.”
Instead of majoring in nursing, he studied architecture and environmental design. He eventually did find his way into health care, as director of patient experience at Mills-Peninsula. His job includes running a volunteer program for about 800 people ages 14 to 94. About 170 are teens, including 37 boys.
Candy stripers disappeared at different times, for different reasons, at different hospitals.
At Sequoia and many other hospitals, they were part of a women’s auxiliary, often started by doctors’ wives, Jones said. The auxiliary was separate from the hospital. It supported itself with gift shops and fundraisers and donated any excess to the hospital.
Over time, “it became very arduous,” and “the women got tired or aged out,” Jones said. As the auxiliaries died off, candy stripers went with them. Hospitals took over volunteer operations and hired employees to run them. “It became easier to manage, and we don’t have to do our own fundraising to sustain ourselves,” Jones said.
At Sequoia, candy stripers became “volunteens,” and then just volunteers, she added.
Linda Darmanin, supervisor of Sequoia’s volunteer program, was a candy striper at St. Francis Hospital in San Francisco in the early 1970s.
“My first assignment was working in the coffee shop, waiting tables, making sundaes. My last year I was responsible for the care cart, delivering magazines and books to patients and visiting patients in their rooms.”
One thing that hasn’t changed: “Patients were frightened then and they are frightened today. The hospital is so clinical, we tend to forget the other part of health care, the human relationships we build. Just seeing the loneliness of so many people, it still touches me today when a patient is here for a major procedure and may not have any family or friends, just being there to listen to their story” is an important job for volunteers.
At Kaiser Permanente, candy stripers went out around the same time nurses stopped wearing white, form-fitting uniforms with hose, said Michelle Morgan, volunteer service manager for its San Jose and Santa Clara medical centers. “It was in the late ’60s, early ’70s. It was the era of women’s lib and women coming of age. They wanted to have a less Florence Nightingale and more clinical image. They dropped the nursing hats, the capes they used to wear and went to more medical attire, like scrubs.”
The candy striping uniform also went into mothballs and teens adopted the pink jacket worn by adult volunteers, called pink ladies. Men joining the volunteer ranks in the 1980s and 1990s wore pink vests. Eventually, “we moved to a more neutral color, blue,” for all volunteers, Morgan said.
As uniforms changed, so did the role of volunteers at Kaiser. Candy stripers used to assist nurses, taking out the trash, changing beds, retrieving documents.
“Volunteers now cannot do any of those tasks. Those are done by paid staff,” Morgan said.
Kaiser volunteers now play more of a customer service role. They greet patients, give directions and offer transportation assistance.
High school volunteers are exposed to a wide range of health care careers, Sullivan said.
Leon Zhao, a junior at Oceana High in Pacifica, has been volunteering at Mills Peninsula since February 2017, racking up 350-plus hours. He also plays tennis, volunteers at a food pantry and for the Civil Air Patrol, and is involved in student government.
Zhao thinks he wants to be a doctor, but volunteering has made him realize “that there are so many other things you can do” in a hospital. “If I wanted to be a lawyer, I could still work in a hospital.”
Hospitals say they love the energy high schoolers bring, but teens are so busy that scheduling can be a problem and turnover is higher than among adult volunteers.
“Having them in the hospital is a lot of work, but (developing talent) is one of our core missions,” Mindermann said. “It’s one of the things we need to do to make sure we have great health care providers in the future.” Kathleen Pender is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: kpender @sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kathpender