Welcome to IA Professional
This resource is designed to provide GPs and those working in primary care with a better understanding of the issues that may be presented to them by patients with a stoma, in particular an ileostomy, or an internal pouch.
Equally, you may meet with patients who need, or are considering, surgery and require more information to make an informed choice about their potential operation. A patient who is better informed will be in a far better place mentally to deal with the changes they face and have a clearer understanding to decide whether they will have a permanent stoma, or a temporary stoma leading to a reversal/internal pouch (ileoanal pouch).
This platform hosts a number of videos and downloadable documentation, which will continue to be added to. The videos are designed to help provide you with a deeper understanding of the subjects, whilst the documentation includes literature that can be downloaded and passed to your patients to help them. If there is a topic you’d like to know more about, please let us know via the contact page.
At present you will find Internal Pouch videos; stoma videos will follow soon.
IA is a national charity, formed in 1956, and is founded on peer-to-peer support. With a network of local groups across the UK and Ireland, there is support on a local level as well as nationally. Groups can be found on our patient-facing website www.iasupport.org
For patients who need someone to talk to, you can refer them with confidence to our One2One Support, where we endeavour to match patient to qualified Support Volunteer in terms of age, gender, surgery and lifestyle preferences. All of our Support Volunteers have successfully completed our training program which is endorsed by the Association of Stoma Care Nurses. The patient can apply themselves, or you can put in the referral for them at https://iasupport.org/request-one2one-support/
