Hi Ali.
Funnily enough, it was staring her right in the face, I had my 5th right toe of the right foot removed on the 19th November 2014 and was having my dressing changed daily in the week at another surgery as I had to move from my home to my sisters as I wasn't allowed to drive and had to offload it as much as possible.
The weekends were covered at the local hospital by community district nurses, and this is where I found a vast disparity in experience and knowledge of community nurses, not good.
Things like not having sterile scissors, or tweezers with them, and not being able to get them from the hospital.
On the occasion with the tap water, I brought all the dressings and an aerosol of saline solution put out for her to use, but because she didn't know how to alter the bed, while I was dealing with that I didn't notice where she got the water from to clean the wound.
I only found that out after she had finished dressing the wound and while she was clearing up, I noticed there were no empty plastic tubes that are used to contain the saline solution, so asked what she had used as she didn't use the aerosol one I brought.
She had used tap water, and didn't know the aerosol contained sterile saline, even though it was written all over it!
I also had a ribbon packing dressing that had to be changed every day, as the little toe had been taken off back to the metatarsal, it left a hole nearly 25mm deep, that usually took a length of 100mm ribbon to fill it, and left around 80mm to remove the next day.
On this occasion the nurse had washed the wound and then started to dry it, so I queried why she
hadn't removed the ribbon, she said she had washed it all out, which patently she had not and I could still see it in there - She wouldn't have it and argued with me that it had all dissolved, in the end I relented as she said I was being aggressive, but then she started to try and pull it out, and then squeezed it, by then I had had enough and said to her to leave it alone and finish dressing it, I was amazed when she then opened the ribbon dressing and started to push it in on top of the old one!
I let her finish, thanked her and left, when I got back to my sisters, I sterilized a pair of stainless steel tweezers, removed the outer dressing, removed the ribbon she had packed over the old one, removed that as well, cleaned the wound, repacked it with the remaining part that was left and redressed my foot.
Luckily the next day was Monday, and could then have it done by the practice nurse at the surgery, who couldn't imagine how a supposedly proffessional nurse could make such a hashup of something that is basic
