“I FEEL a bit scruffy wearing this,” says Lyn Vardon, a nurse assistant at the Hillingdon Hospital in Uxbridge. Her work outfit for the day is a striped pyjama set. Other staff, and even the hospital’s nursing director, are in nightwear, too. The idea is to bring attention to the opposite: a move to get patients changed out of hospital gowns and pyjamas into their own clothes—and then up and moving. Two-thirds of National Health Service trusts in England are doing this, under the slogan #EndPJparalysis.

“Pyjama paralysis” is the bane of hospital wards, says Brian Dolan, an affable academic and a registered nurse who started the campaign. A hospital gown, he says, makes patients feel weaker than they are. To caregivers, it signals inability to perform even basic activities like washing or sitting up in a chair. It is, after all, the uniform of the sick.

The result is what medics call deconditioning syndrome. Loss of muscle power begins within a day or two of becoming bedridden, explains Amit Arora, a geriatrician. For the muscles of someone over 80, a week in bed is equivalent to ten years of ageing. Feeling weaker leads to loss of confidence about recovery. This worsens health further. For a frail elderly patient, just a couple of days in a hospital bed can mean a shift from independent living to a care home.

Hospitals are designed for patients sitting in bed. Many lack, for example, dining areas where those who can shuffle about can sit down for a meal. Space between beds is often too tight for walking frames. Helping patients change into their own clothes every day takes staff more time than business as usual, says Jacqueline Walker, Hillingdon’s nursing director. But it is worth it, she says, because patients feel better and faster recovery can save the hospital a lot of money. A patient in a hospital bed costs the NHS £300-400 ($400-535) a day.

Putting hospital pyjamas in the cross-hairs is not without its challenges. “We have to sell the idea to patients and family members,” admits Ms Walker. Patients who live alone or in a care home may have only one change of clothes—those in which they were admitted. Hillingdon’s nurses rely on a donated stash.

So far there is no firm evidence on whether or not the anti-pyjama initiative is helping to cut hospital stays or any of the consequences of deconditioning, such as falls. But it certainly makes a hospital stay less dreary. Lillian Walker, an 86-year-old patient at Hillingdon’s rehabilitation ward, is recovering from a leg amputation. Yet, sitting at a table next to her bed in a crisp white blouse and an elegant pink scarf clasped with a brooch, she looks poised. “If I knew you were coming,” she says, “I’d have had my hair done, too.”