Catheter Care Dissertation

5148 Words21 Pages
A clinical placement experienced by the author was on a urology ward within a large teaching hospital where many patients attended for various investigations, elective surgery and emergency surgery into urological related disorders. Accordingly due to the nature of the work area a majority of the patients on the ward had to be catheterised and patients were often discharged home with long-term urethral catheters in situ. As part of the authors experience in developing knowledge and skills observations were under taken into urethral catheter care assessment. The theoretical framework used to guild the nurses in their assessment was that of Roper, Logan and Tierney’s 12 activities of daily living with one of these being that of sexuality. Sadler (1991) suggests that catheter care should be carefully planned and monitored and crisis management avoided. Therefore, Individual sexuality and sexual activity should be assessed when an individual is catheterised which forms part of his or her treatment, regardless of gender or age (Atkinson 1997). However when the nurses in the author’s personal experience got to the sexuality point of the assessment, the author noticed a shortfall in the way it was conducted. The issue of sexuality was often omitted or documentation was limited to grooming and appearance. Although this could be interpretated as one end of the sexuality spectrum, the physical act of sexual intercourse could be interpretated as the other. Therefore, nurses have a responsibility to help and advise people to achieve as high a level of sexual well being at both ends of the spectrum (Rafferty 1995). As a urethral catheterisation procedure involves the genitalia, it is reasonable to assume that issues of sexuality are potentially raised for the patient as part of holistic patient care. However, there is possibility that this might be passed over (Webb
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