Advice for new healthcare assistant -patients' personal care

Hi All,

I am studying speech and language therapy with a view to become a speech therapist once I have graduated. I have been applying for health care assistant roles as I hope it will provide me with great experience to kickstart my career in healthcare, and I’ve been successful in getting a healthcare assistant position at a rehabilitation centre for patients with brain injuries.

I’m really excited to begin this new role as it’s my first position in the healthcare sector. I’m absolutely fine with most jobs I understand I’ll be completing, however the one thing I’m nervous about is helping patients with toileting activities and cleaning after bowel movements. I’m comfortable with most things (vomit, urine, puss, blood etc.) however I know my stomach isn’t very strong when it comes to faeces! In cleaning jobs in the past I have actually vomited from the sight and smell!

I really want to conquer this before I begin my role as I don’t want to embarrass patients by gagging or worse. Does anybody have advice on how I might become more comfortable with this task please? I would really appreciate it as I am very keen about this new job.

Thank you in advance!

Good luck with you future career!

Funny that I can manage poo no problem but vomit I can’t stay in the room and urine smells much worse than poo, especially if it’s not really fresh. Not too good with blood either. I would hope this would be covered in your training but that might be optimistic. Good that you’re trying to preempt any problems and thinking from the carees point of view. I’ll be watching that video link later if I think I can stomach it but just the thought of watching it’s making my stomach turn. I didn’t think I’d be happy dealing with poo but ended up in a position where it would gave been cruel to someone I loved not to deal with it and discovered it’s really nowhere near as bad as I expected. Hope you enjoy your new job.