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Paralysed Bowel Care Awareness Day 2026
It’s not only mobility. SCI means bowels can be paralysed too.
Bowel care is often neglected in medical settings due to the lack of training opportunities. Which can be life threatening. SIA provide essential care plans for anyone who is concerned about their bowel care in medical settings, and offer specialist training to healthcare professionals. But we want to do more. We want to help healthcare professionals challenge the bowel care policy at their NHS Trust. If it isn’t good enough, let’s improve it. Together.
On Paralysed Bowel Care Awareness Day 2026 we’re telling Julie’s shocking story
Bowel care in general, medical settings is not geared up for people with spinal cord injury (or anyone with a neurogenic bowel). Being unable to go to the toilet is not only degrading, it can be incredibly dangerous.
Julie developed the life threatening condition Autonomic Dysreflexia, and if she hadn’t been transferred to a spinal unit, with our intervention, things could’ve been much worse.
Spinal Injuries Association’s SCI Specialist Nurse Lead, Carol Adcock, said,
“Paralysed bowel care should not be ‘a nice to have’ in the NHS. It is an essential care requirement in both acute and community healthcare settings. Providing this care will prevent avoidable complications and costly hospital admissions. It is much cheaper, and humane, to provide structured, appropriate timely interventions than treat unmanaged paralysed bowel.”
In our latest What Matters survey, nearly 50% of you (who had been inpatients in the last two years) told us that your bowel care was poorly managed in medical settings. Poor bowel care isn’t just degrading; it’s dangerous and can be fatal to those susceptible to autonomic dysreflexia (AD).
It’s vital that healthcare professionals who work with the spinal cord injury community understand the importance of appropriate rectal interventions for those with neurogenic bowels. A regular bowel routine is good – a predictable one is even better! Learn more about our training courses from the Frank Williams Academy:
managing the neurogenic bowel after sci course
Write to your MP
We are asking you to share your experiences of bowel care in medical settings with your MP. By sharing your experiences, we can show MPs how important paralysed bowel care is. Please download the template letter here, and change the details in red to then send to your MP.
download the template letterFIND YOUR MP CONTACT DETAILS
Find out more about the work SIA are doing to change things
paralysed bowel care awareness