Dignified Care for Plus-size Patients

This is the first in a series of three posts with accompanying videos, each of which focuses on a different aspect of dignified care for plus-size patients.

We appreciate how busy you are so have kept things short. The video is less than 90 seconds long and the post will only take a few minutes to read.

Here, we look at the importance of education, and how it can be utilised to deliver dignified care.

Dignified Care – Understanding how the Patient Feels

First and foremost, we need to understand how to ask the right questions to achieve the best care for each patient. This isn’t as easy as it might sound, and needs a structured approach to make sure nothing important is missed. During my day-to-day work as a bariatric product specialist with Medstrom, I’ve seen how key education is to delivering high quality, evidence based care to plus-size patients.

Without that education, it’s very difficult to fully appreciate many of the challenges the patient faces. For example, what does dignified care look like? How does it feel to wear an empathy suit, trying to put clothes on and struggling with repositioning in bed? And how will we know how that patient feels if we haven’t experienced it ourselves?

We talk about evidence based practice in everything that we do. This should be exactly the same when it comes to caring for this group of patients.

Medstrom’s Educational Days

With all this in mind, we’ve been delivering educational bariatric roadshows right across the UK and Ireland. They are free to attend, and have proved to be very successful, with excellent feedback from clinicians. When I’m delivering these sessions, I always make it very clear that they are are a safe space, with the objective of providing education in the areas that people feel they need. Some of the topics we cover include:

Dignity
Stigma
Statistics for their area
Equipment choice and selection

Following these educational days, clinicians take what they’ve learned back to their Trust or Health Board and cascade it to their staff, helping to ensure the needs of these patients are met moving forward.

If you’d like to find out more about attending a bariatric roadshow either at Medstrom’s Academy in the Midlands or nearer to where you’re based, please don’t hesitate to contact us.