Celebrating Nurses’ Monumental Impact
There is a myriad of ways to participate in National Nurses Week, which is celebrated May 6-12, from honoring your staff RNs with a gift or event to taking steps to let...
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By: Dan O'Connor
Published: 3/14/2019
It's easy to lose sight of how vulnerable your patients are when they're laid out on the operating room table, sedated, anesthetized, cold and exposed, precious little covering their bodies and their dignity. We've lost sight, too, on occasion, running photographs of patients in most compromising positions on our covers, like these 2 below.
Clearly, these photos reveal too much, "but at the same time, it's a reality of the unnecessary exposure of many surgery patients in operating rooms," says Misty Roberts, the founder of Medical Patient Modesty (patientmodesty.org), a non-profit organization that works to educate patients about their rights to modesty in medical settings. "So many patients would cancel their surgery if they knew how exposed they would be," she adds.
Ms. Roberts is urging hospitals and surgery centers to abandon the "ridiculous" policy that patients remove their underwear for surgeries on such areas as the knee or hand that do not involve genitals.
A couple of orthopedic surgeons have taken matters into their own hands, inventing modesty garments.
"I think that all surgeons should know about those modesty garments," says Ms. Roberts. "More patients would be willing to undergo surgeries if they knew their modesty would be protected."
It is a modest proposal, indeed, to be more sensitive to patients' modesty. OSM
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