Jean’s stool
Jean’s stool would range from type 2 (sausage-shaped by lumpy) or type 3 (like a sausage but with cracks on its surface) mainly because of her immobility, eating and drinking habits. Damjanov (2008) suggest that BSFS is a crucial tool applied by nurses to assess the elimination process of patients with chronic constipation. Sedentary lifestyle and immobility is a severe cause of illness in the elderly, mainly because they lack physical exercise to stimulate physical and mental well-being (Ikidde, 2014). According to Ikidde (2014), BSFS must be used by nurses to understand the level of constipation for a patient and understand which physical exercise fits the patient based on their conditions. Exercises improve the motility of the gastrointestinal tract and its contents, which prevent constipation. Chumpitazi et al. (2016), argue that BSFS has excellent reliability, validity and agreement when applied by nurses to rate patient’s stool type by raters
The nurse will perform a colonic transit study using radiopaque markers and get the abdominal radiographs at different intervals. The patient will be required to ingest the Radiopaque Markers. Colonic transit assessment using ingested Radiopaque Markers has been applied in a wide range since it was introduced (Pomerri et al., 2007). It is a crucial alternative tool because real-time radiographs will be taken and it enables evaluation of how well food ingested by patient moves down through the colon (Pomerri et al., 2007; Beck, 2008). However, one limitation of this method is that it is difficult for the nurse to identify the precise anatomy of the colonic transit outlines, although the tool’s efficacy can be improved through oral administration/ingestion of small amount of barium (Pomerri et al., 2007). Besides the general physical assessment and digital rectal examination, the nurse will use other procedures and tests to assess Jean’s constipation conditions such as Blood Tests by looking at low thyroids (Hypothyroidism) (Heaton & Donnell, 2014). Jean would have low thyroids or calcium levels, which causes constipation.