Bowel care in hospital – tell us your story

Share your experience to help us identify ways to improve this area of care provision.

Prior to the pandemic, we successfully campaigned to get NHS England to issue a Patient Safety Alert about the critical importance of bowel care in hospitals and general medical settings. The alert recommended that all trusts had a formal bowel care policy, and the draft policy developed by us was used by a significant number of trusts to plug this gap in their processes and procedures. It also recommended that resources were in place to support those requiring bowel care intervention seven days a week.

Despite this success, and some tangible improvements in hospital care that followed, it’s clear from calls to our support line and from responses to the What Matters? survey that bowel care remains a problem for spinal cord injured (SCI) people. In the most recent What Matters? survey, a massive 72% of respondents identified bowel care as one of the areas that has the biggest impact on their life, health and wellbeing. And our Nurse Specialists are regularly supporting people where the level of bowel care they’ve received in hospital has fallen well short of the standard a patient should expect.

With this in mind, SIA are going to re-engage with NHS representatives and campaign to identify other ways to improve this area of care provision – and you can help! If you’ve had bad bowel care in a medical setting in 2022, please email [email protected] with details of what happened, so we can use the experiences of our members to underpin this vital campaign for change.

Thank you very much for your support.