Last week's 3 days attachment with Home Nursing was fun. Travelling by foot from Newton to St.Micheals to Towner to Whompoa.. phew.. i can't exactly remember the places.. it was all totally new to me.. places where i never been to. We then, understood why we need to bring umbrella. I am a little bit tanned now.
Together with me were my classmate, Poh Yen and Group 7's, Yee Hong. We tagged with 2 staff nurses.. SN Yeo and SN Crystal. They were fantastic. We were given chance to practice insert Naso-gastric tube, urinary catherization and wound cleaning. Most of the patients are diabetic with cavity wound on their foot and some already gone to gangrene stage, the wounds were big and some smells too..one lady do not want to amputate.. she said she would rather die. Most of the older patients have bed sores.
oh... i do not want to grow old suffer like this..
We can tell how well these patients are taken care of, by their maids or family members by assessing the way they maintain their home. It does not mean that living in a condo, the best care is given to the sick elderly..
I observed that the ones living in 2/3 room flat, takes pride in caring for their loved ones eventhough they have limited means of living.. Nothing else matters to the caregivers or people at home.. what matters most are caring for the sick elderly.. they really go all out- they placed the hospital bed in the living room and that took up a half of the place.. and not to exclude, the things they need by the bedside.. salute to them all. This is what i call, patient-care centred.
In this posting,we got an emergency call to attend to a male patient whose penis bleed, traumatised by the no of times,where the other incontinence-trained nurse, had tried to insert the urinary catheter into him. So we went even though, our staff nurse is not trained to do that. That trained nurse had used up 3 catheter set and we do not carry one at all. So, we had to go to another patient's house to borrow one.
By the time we were there, it stopped bleeding and his maid took good care of his penis. The man was about 60 plus and uncommunicative. His private part was so clean and we really had to say to the maid what a good job she has done for cleaning up the mess. Amazingly the SN finished the job, with confidence ...and the 3 of us just look at it.. I thought we need to hold the penis for about a few minutes for the lignocant to take effect. I was like counting away... but in about 20 secs, the SN inserted the 16F tube into the meatus. When we left the place, three of us couldn't hide our expression, though embarrassed, but finally all of us got to say this " the maid cleaned the head of the penis till it shines! " We laughed, continued with our next mission- to insert an NG tube, the patient pulled it out when we had just inserted it that same morning. The maid did not restraint him... we were so tired, the weather was so hot.. but we are happy with what had been accomplished at the end of the day.
I feel that 3 days of home nursing posting is not enough. Home nursing care gave us confident and it was an eye opener- to be able to be see how people, rich or poor, care for the sick at home.
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