On Thursday 20th March 2025, the project team (Dr Claire Jones and Dr Kate McAllister) attended the Bladder and Bowel UK Symposium in Bolton!
This day-long symposium was aimed at a wide range of healthcare professionals with an interest in continence care, including specialist adult or children’s bladder and bowel nurses, urologists, health visitors, allied healthcare professionals, school nurses, doctors and those working in care homes. The programme was divided up into two streams, with papers that focused either on issues relating to adult or paediatric bladder and bowel conditions.
Dr Jones spoke to attendees of the paediatric stream during the first panel of the day, presenting a paper titled ‘“Buzzers for Bedwetters”: Modern Histories of Urinary Incontinence and Their Uses Today’. To an audience of over 90 people, Dr Jones outlined how and why incontinence came to be seen as a significant medical and moral problem in Britain over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing specifically on childhood ‘bedwetting’ and enuresis, and moving from habit training and mother-blaming, to the rise of the ‘whole child’ approach via the disciplines of psychology, social work and public health, and then to re-emergence of habit via the introduction of the buzzer. Though the conceptions of urine incontinence undoubtedly changed during this period, Dr Jones also emphasised the need to acknowledge important continuities, perhaps most clearly reflected in continued medical uncertainty and debate about what causes enuresis, and about how it might be effectively treated. To end the presentation, Dr Jones asked the audience, many of whom were practising nurses or paediatricians, to reflect on how this history might prove useful in the present. She suggested that this might be through helping children and their families feel less alone in their condition, by facilitating more open conversations about bladder health and toileting, but also in allowing bladder health professionals to become more informed and reflective practitioners. Their responses were gathered via questionnaires, and will be used to help shape the public outputs of the project going forward.
We would like to thank Davina Richardson, Karen Irwin and the organisers of the symposium for the opportunity to present and discuss our research.
If you would like to learn more about our work, feel free to get in touch with us via email!