Elderly Adult Wellness Program That

¶ … elderly adult wellness program that provides a practical learning opportunity for nursing students in the context of delivering valuable health services to members of a community in need. Specifically, a Wellness Program was incorporated into the public housing community by setting up nursing students to deliver general forms of health, wellness, and quality-of-life support to elderly residents of a public housing facility. It consists of initial assessments conducted by students at the beginning of every semester, to identify the perceived needs of the residence.

That phase allows residents to communicate their interests and requests for services and benefits. The nursing students devise health education presentations based on the interests of the residence and they promote and lead exercise classes and other recreational activities. A community room in the building is dedicated to the program. Some of the more important classes are those that teach safety and fall prevention to reduce potential injuries and health and safety threats to the population.

The students also conduct home visits to check on residents who are unable to make it to the community room in person and they also deliver certain services on a one-to-one basis that way. The program features a medication review to allow the students to monitor the medications being taken by the residents, to ensure compliance with prescription instructions, and to educate the residents about their medications, such as in connection with recognizing contraindicated combinations.

The students also provide assistance managing chronic conditions by monitoring symptoms and they help negotiate the resolution of disagreements among the residents. Reflective Response In some respects, the article illustrates that the essence of modern health care need not be restricted to clinical care, although clinical care is certainly a crucial component of contemporary health care delivery.

It is likely that the opportunity to contribute to the health, safety, and welfare of a community of a vulnerable patient population is as valuable to the development of good nurses as any other conceivable practicum or practical program. With a focus on scientific medicine sometimes dominating the delivery side of health care, programs such as these help reinforce some of the characteristics and strengths that are valuable in professional nurses and other health care providers.

Another important aspect of the program is that it provides support of the type whose need can typically be overlooked because clinicians have such limited time for non-medical issues or complaints of patients. In many cases, low-income patient populations who rely on publicly provided medical services have no source of assistance with non-medical issues. In some respects, this program is particularly valuable precisely because it actually is a form of preventative medicine that the American approach to health care is still relatively ignorant of more generally.

By allowing health care professionals to educate patients about issues of specific concern to their health, the program helps prevent or at least reduce the likelihood of certain kinds of health and safety threats. Similarly, by providing a medication review system and ongoing monitoring of chronic diseases and symptoms, the program allows residents to receive appropriate intervention at the earliest possible stage of disease rather than after acute symptoms manifest themselves and complications develop that require more serious forms of intervention.

Obviously, the picture presented by the program described in the article is a positive situation that demonstrates some of the most meaningful ways that health care providers can promote and help maintain human health in vulnerable populations whose members might typically receive fewer than all of the health and health-related service that they actually require for optimal health, safety, and wellness.

However, another small part of the article illustrates a less optimistic constant that might be depressing to many people who think about it, especially people who are preparing to devote their lives to the service of others. Specifically, one of the social issues mentioned in the article is that there is a problem about second-hand smoke in the facility.

The author describes a situation where the response on the part of some of the smoking residents to complaints about the effect their smoking has on some of their neighbors was to remove the "No Smoking" signs in the common areas such as the Laundry Room. As health.