Caring for Elderly Patients With Dementia Nursing Interventions

Caring for the Elderly

"Caring for elderly patients with dementia: nursing interventions"

The paper is centered around identifying the challenges that people living with dementia face and how these can be handled in order to make their lives easier that it is currently. The paper therefore looks at the supportive strategies that should be employed in dealing with this group of patients. These strategies include the correct assessment process, correct problem identification and ultimately a nursing intervention that is geared towards providing quality life for the patient with full cognizance of the status of the cognitive ability of the patient. This concern expressed by the paper is founded on the fact that most of the time the mental and behavioral challenges faced by this group are often ignored, coupled with the difficulty in identifying such conditions and the patients are totally vulnerable. It is imperative therefore that the nurses detect dementia through a comprehensive assessment hence being able to link the nursing intervention to the real problem.

The research bases it conclusions and analyses predominantly based on the qualitative approach but also uses in a few instances the quantitative approach. The qualitative method was the one that was widely used in the paper with material drawn from guidelines, educational articles, descriptive studies, literature reviews as well as psychometric studies. The quantitative method is used when using the data presented by the Boustani for the percentage of people with cognitive impairments which was presented here as 43% of the sample size and among this sample size, 61% had documentation for it. A further report of 145 patients studied of age 65 years and above it is presented that 51% were fond to be suffering from cognitive impairment that was consistent with dementia. The participants in the research were adults, hospitalized patients suffering chronic cognitive decline as well as content experts from both the hospital and academia were involved. With the help of this group, some of the findings and recommendations included the need to integrate the required information by the nurses into the workflow, need to use the clinical information system to support the bedside nurses in their knowledge when dealing with dementia patients, the need to screen people who are 65 years and above before they get admitted for any history of dementia.