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Hospital gives pink-haired volunteer a pink slip
By Logan Jenkins6 a.m.Sept. 29, 2013


This is the hospital ID issued to Ruth Mattes.

Ruth Mattes, a retired New York teacher working for free at the front desk of the new Palomar Medical Center in Escondido, was fired early this month because of her color.

Not the color of her skin but the color of her pink hair.

I visited Mattes in a tastefully furnished North Escondido fairway condo where the grandmother of three lives with her husband, also a retired teacher.

After several months growing out, the pink looks like a layer of frosting on her impeccably groomed salt-and-pepper hair.

“It will be gone with the next haircut,” she says.

In the summer, Mattes had what you might call a wild hair. She decided to dye her locks purple for an Adam Lambert concert at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. Mattes wasn’t happy with the dye she applied herself and let her hairdresser even it out to a deep pink.

Soon after this flamboyant transformation, Mattes applied for a volunteer position at Palomar. She enjoys a busy recreational life of pickleball, mah-jongg and yoga, but she thought her outgoing personality and computer skills would be a good fit for the hospital’s reception desk.

It’s not an easy gig to get. She paid a $50 deposit, sat for a 45-minute interview, took two hours of training, got a required TB test, toured the hospital, had her photo taken for her official ID and shadowed a volunteer for an hour.

During this exhaustive process, she was never once told that her cotton-candy coiffure was a problem. She signed a policy agreement that made no mention of hair color.

After completing three shifts, Mattes got the first inkling that she was in trouble, though she didn’t know why. During a conference call, Fran Waller, the director of volunteers, said her hair violated the hospital’s dress code, which stipulates that “hair should be clean, neatly styled and of a ‘natural’ hair color (i.e., not colors unnatural to human hair).”

In other words, hair color can be artificial, but not unnaturally artificial.

In a Sept. 16 letter to the fired Mattes, Palomar Health CEO Michael Covert supported Waller’s call and went to pains to explain why hospitals cannot condone anything out of the ordinary. The risk of upsetting patients is too great.

Covert granted that people can do whatever they want on their own time. “However, when you choose, through demeanor, dress, look or action to step out in a public setting designed to promote safety and comfort — that may take away from that image, then you have stepped over the bounds of acceptability — at least for volunteers in our organization.”

Meanwhile, Mattes was asking the fundamental question: All that pious sobriety about appearance is well and good, but Mattes went through an extensive orientation — and three four-hour shifts — before alarm bells went off.
Mattes says she would have understood if she’d been told upfront that she’d have to dye her hair or wait until the pink grew out before starting as a volunteer.

Bobette Brown, Palomar’s official spokeswoman, confirmed Friday that Mattes’ job performance was not at issue. Brown conceded that lower-level management fouled up. The whole incident is most unfortunate.

Here’s where things stand.

Mattes has not yet been sent her $50 deposit. Even with her hair returning to its natural color, she has no interest in going back to work for an organization that treated her like a shabby 65-year-old punk rocker unfit for public service when, in fact, she has remarkably good fashion sense (and no visible tattoos or piercings, as others apparently do at Palomar).

Mattes takes some comfort in knowing she did nothing wrong. She was doing well — and good — as the pink lady.

She fondly remembers the smiles from hospital guests who’d ask if she was gearing up to observe Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which starts Tuesday, or if she’s a breast cancer survivor waving the pink flag.

As for the hospital’s management, it should be tearing out its hair that a volunteer was treated so shabbily.
logan.jenkins@utsandiego.com

Link to article: www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/sep/29/hospital-pink-hair/




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