"Designated Continance Nurses"

There some pretty amazing nurses that do fantastic work caring for vulnerable people in the general wards at Wycombe Hospital. Most go way beyond their duties to ensure that care is given to those not strong enough to care for themselves.

However, a Continence Nurse is not readily available for those whom need that specific care service. In my view, a Continence Nurse should be available to assist patients requiring specialist bowel treatment in all the general wards (rather than just ICU) to give basic care to the doubly incontinent. Patients whom can not get out of bed, have not control over their bowels, are tetraplegic / paraplegic or, unable to use the hard-seated commodes available due to the high risk of bed sores.

There must be quite a number of patients whom are both ill and vulnerable that need assistance with bowel management in the form of bed evacuation. This really should be done by a designated Continence Nurse rather than the ward nurses. Yet, the current policy at the hospital is to let the ward nurses decide whether they wish to care for a doubly inconstant patient by administering bowel evacuation or, not.

Thank you so much to those ward nurses whom put patient care above all else, and opt to provide bowel evacuation despite the fact it is voluntary! You don’t have to do it but, you do because you care.

Bowel management is a fundamental care duty; doubly important if the patient is doubly-incontinent.

Maybe hospital policy should look into the importance of bowel evacuations for those whom require it and, provide a Continence Nurse as a basic duty of care instead of relying on ward nurse co-operation to help care for the patients requiring this care.