Tiana Howard

Brief Outline:

Tiana works with the larger urogynaecology team within a hospital, looking after people with pelvic organ prolapse, urinary incontinence, relapsing urine infections or bladder pain syndrome. She supports people with tests and investigations, before and after surgery, and with any questions they may have. She also helps run the pessary service. Tiana has worked in urogynaecology for over 14 years.

Background:

Tiana is a urogynaecology specialist nurse.

Tiana, a specialist urogynaecology nurse, reflects on the important but sensitive topic of weight management in relation to urogynaecological symptoms.

I’ve had more patients be concerned or, or worried about discussing their weight, and you know again we do that in a very sensitive way to say that this isn’t about the way you look, it’s about the impact it has on your, your medical, you know your, medically what this has an impact on as opposed to you know worrying about that. But often that can go hand in hand if somebody is particularly overweight, or they’re struggling to lose weight, and then that causes problems with intimacy, and, and they are, or they’re avoiding these sorts of things, and then that on top of any problems that they have with for instance incontinence during intercourse, you know that, that, that, that is also, it kind of spirals on for a lot of our patients who have one problem that they’re really worried, really concerned about, but actually then that has a knock-on effect. Or, being incontinent then isn’t allowing them to do certain exercises for them to lose the weight, and then that becomes a really, really difficult cycle that we recognise and acknowledge that it’s not easy to fix. It’s easy to have a discussion about, but it’s not easy to address.