| |
The implications for practice is that firstly thorough clinical testing is extremely important, as whilst a pregnancy test may indicate a non-pregnancy, it has been shown to not always be a reliable testing method and so the need to also carry out blood tests, sonographs and other relevant clinical tests becomes increasingly crucial as accurate pregnancy testing can prevent patients from making mistaken conclusions about their condition, such as we saw in Patient 5.
The second implication for practice is the realisation of the emotional drain on the nurses that care for a patient that suffers from a pseudocyesis, as the episode is always going to be an intense and difficult affair. In my opinion it would be prudent of clinical management to ensure and encourage nursing staff to speak with a counsellor with whom they can discuss their lived experiences with and possibly further to that, hold a counsellor led team debrief in order for the nurses to express and unburden themselves in a safe environment. I recommend this based on the fact that the nurses, when discussing their lived experience, expressed many unresolved thoughts and feelings on the subject and several said to me outside of the interview encounter that it was the first time that they had really discussed the issue in any depth. This is important as nurses negative lived experience can impact the quality of the care they are able to deliver long-term (Hyde 1958).
The third implication for practice is that the medications with a known history of being linked with pseudocyesis episodes, such as we saw in Patient 3, should be clearly indicated as having been so – whether in medical textbooks, medication boxes, medication charts etc. This would assist in ensuring that should pregnancy-like symptoms develop in a patient, particularly in women on inpatient psychiatric wards, the staff are aware that they must first rule out medication side-effects before declaring and treating a ‘pregnancy’. However, this will no doubt prove difficult to enforce as there remains a lack of rigorous clinical testing to categorically prove or disprove a medication’s capacity for inducing pregnancy-like symptoms which go on to provoke an episode of pseudocyesis with a patient.
The educational implication is that essentially there should be some level of education on the subject in clinical field such as mental health nursing, midwifery and obstetrics. This would raise awareness amongst the nursing staff who are arguably most likely to encounter a patient suffering from a pseudocyesis and would also help to combat the lack of confidence nurses feel when treating a patient with pseudocyesis.
The implication for research is that I believe that this dissertation has added to the body of knowledge and understanding in the academic and public domains. This dissertation has built on the case reports previously presented in the United Kingdom by Moselhy (2000) and Ahuja (2008) with the result of reinforcing that there is a correlation between episodes of pseudocyesis and current/historical diagnoses of mental health conditions. This apparent correlation of pseudocyesis and mental health condition should now be taken forward and investigated further.
|
