In Uni, very often, we were taught about importance of patient modesty with appropriate draping of towels over limbs. How abt physios?
Had a challenging case over last week. The patient is a 55 year old male, with post-kidney transplant and idiopathic demyelinating encephalopathy. Throughout his inpatient stay, he had behavioral/ impulsive issues. Hence it’s quite common to read in the notes that patient had many outbursts of aggression, falling down, requiring sedation (such as midazalem) It had been a challenging time rehabilitating him because he had short attention span, and did not respond well to non-functional treatment. Hence both gareth and me had been engaging him with functional activities, and varying the activities to catch his attention.

What happened one day was we were walking this patient down the hallway when the patient suddenly grabbed the bottom of my shirt, pulling it, started staring at my (L) chest (or boob). At that point in time, I was dumbfounded for a few min with many thought processes going through in my mind. With his history of aggression in mind, I was caught between allowing him to continue with what’s he’s doing or immediate reaction of pulling his hand away with risk of being punched in the face. In the end I did neither, and decided to be firm with him, yet politely asked him to put his hand down and continue the walk quickly to distract him. Gareth also helped by gaining his attention with other activities. Amazingly it worked quite well. He was compliant and did not resist us.

Something new learnt during inpt neuro placement… not sure whether any of you (females) had such similar experience before?