Continence service

Bladder and bowel issues can have a negative impact on your life. If you experience bladder and/or bowel issues you can feel embarrassment, distress, a sense of loss of control and a lowered self-confidence and self-esteem. This may lead to you to withdraw from everyday activities, avoid social situations and can cause strain on both personal and professional relationships, affecting work and impacting on loved ones.

The aim of our continence nurse-led service is to try to significantly improve your quality of life.

Not all our patients are incontinent, you may have symptoms of urinary frequency and/or urgency without leaking, symptoms of prolapse, suffer recurrent urinary tract infections, chronic constipation or incomplete bladder emptying. Through a combination of a detailed assessment and lifestyle changes and an individualised treatment plan, we hope to improve your physical symptoms. This can in turn have a beneficial impact on your self-confidence and self-esteem, giving you freedom from anxiety around toileting, and generally improving your quality of life.

Referrals

Patients (aged from 18) can be referred by GPs, Consultants, district nursing, other speciality teams.

Some patients are referred by family or other relatives and they can also self-refer.

Referrals are triaged and patients are placed on a waiting list according to their level of need. The allocated nurse will then make an initial telephone assessment call. The information supplied enables the nurse to decide whether to you need to be seen face to face, either in a clinic setting or a home visit, or if it’s appropriate to continue with advice by telephone.

We aim to discharge our patients within 6 appointments (including telephone reviews). These are usually spaced 6-8 weeks apart. We may need to see you face to face to repeat examinations or bladder scans etc. We always give each patient our direct telephone contact details and assure them they can self-refer in the future if they need to.