How to remove the unmentionable

Nurses must acquire some skills that non-medical people find embarrassing, disgusting, maybe even childish. Such knowledge can be difficult to obtain from the standard medical books and journals. A monograph called How to Perform a Digital Removal of Faeces aims to remedy one such gap in the literature.

Gaye Kyle, a senior lecturer at the faculty of health and human science at Thames Valley University in Slough, researched the subject in depth. She published her findings in the journal Continence Essentials.

There exists an official document that purports to provide the digital-removal information a nurse needs to know. But Kyle finds that document wanting…

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.