Urinary incontinence in hospital in-patients: a nursing perspective

Urinary incontinence is a common health problem with not only physical, but also far-reaching psychological and social implications for the sufferer, her family and carers. Assisting patients with meeting their eliminatory needs is a fundamental part of nursing care. Incontinence is encountered in almost every sphere of clinical practice and is a problem with which nurses are often directly concerned. Nurses, in association with other members of the health care team, have considerable potential to help patients regain continence, or when this is not possible, to ensure that the individuals concerned, and their relatives or carers, can cope effectively with the problem, both physically and psychologically. This is an area of nursing care, however, which to date has attracted little research. The studies undertaken in this thesis sought to examine the nursing assessment and management of the care of patients with urinary incontinence in acute medical and care of the elderly wards. The research comprises of a sequence of studies which examined the problem from a number of perspectives. Methods of data collection included nurse and patient self-, reports, the examination of nursing and medical documentation, direct observation and self-completed questionnaires. Findings indicated that urinary incontinence was common in acute medical and care of the elderly wards, and that a considerable proportion of patients had indwelling catheters to manage the problem. Nurses were not always aware of patients' incontinence problems and their assessments concerning important aspects of the symptom were frequently unreliable. Further inadequacies in nurses' assessments, as well as in the management of the care of patients with incontinence, were identified from an examination of the nursing and medical records, and observations of verbal hand-over reports. Qualified nurses and learners appeared ill-informed about the causes of incontinence, and the majority had little knowledge of the range of factors which need to be considered to ensure that a systematic assessment of the problem is carried out. Despite considerable scope for the provision of rehabilitative care for incontinence sufferers, many nurses appeared to have a limited appreciation of their potential for initiating such care. Evidence collected from the nursing and medical records, the verbal hand-over reports and nurses' questionnaires, suggested that the management of patients with incontinence still focuses predominantly on measures which aim to contain the problem with little attention being given to rehabilitative interventions. A considerable proportion of the charge nurses, and the majority of the other qualified nursing staff, stated they had not received any continuing in-service education relevant to the promotion of continence or management of incontinence since their basic training. Nurses exhibited positive attitudes, overall, towards the management of incontinence but their responses indicated that a number of common misconceptions surrounding the problem persist. The enrolled nurses demonstrated significantly less positive attitudes towards the management of patients with incontinence than other grades of nurses. Similarly, the nursing staff who worked in the slow-stream rehabilitation care of the elderly wards showed significantly less positive attitudes towards incontinence than the nurses working in other types of wards. The implications of the findings of these studies for nursing practice, education and further research are discussed