I've just done Viv's toenails, trimming them for her and applying some gunk to address problems that arose with them a few months after she left hospital last year.
It reminded me that, while she was in hospital for five weeks, I had to attend to her toenails. It wasn't the job of the nurses or HCAs ... maybe, if I had asked enough, they would have engaged a chiropodist to attend to them, but my approach was to do them for her.
This issue shows one of the fundamental problems with hospitals and nursing today; they are too much based on the Florence Nightingale principles, which were fine dealing with war wounds to otherwise fit young men, but are useless for treating the more complex cases that arise in today's NHS.
A patient with poor toenails that remain unclipped may struggle to walk; they will then lose muscle tone, become weaker and need more care from others. Alternatively, they may develop an infection in their nail, which can cause the nail to die, or come off, again making walking difficult.
Surely hospitals should be like I remember boarding school to be ... 'inspection' at least once a week, and everything, down to the smallest detail, to be clean, tidy and healthy... or is it beneath our degree-qualified, professional nursing establishment to consider cutting patient's nails to be part of their duties?
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