Hnc Social Care I Am an Hnc

Hnc Social Care

I am an Hnc SocialCare Student currently on placement within a day care center for older adults. I have experienced an incident in which challenging behavior was an issue. The following essay will detail this incident.

I had been with my current day care center for roughly a year. The center cared for older adults primarily with conditions including dimentia and alzheimer's disease. I was called into my supervisor's office and notified that we were taking on a new patient. The patient was in their 40's and had down syndrome. Our center was offering respite nighttime care. This was to be my first time caring for a down syndrome patient, so I was unsure what to expect.

The patient arrived for care the next evening. We were offering the family overnight relief care. Apparently the young man does not sleep well and often wakes up during the night interrupting his now elderly parent's sleep. So the parents introduced me to their son and explained his likes and dislikes. They also told me that this would be his first time in a night time daycare setting. It was this news that made me slightly apprehensive of watching the man, as most patients have trouble adjusting to new settings. However, I assumed that he would be cooperative given that his condition was a learning disability not a memory issue.

I proceeded to take the man to his room to show him where everything was. He had not eaten dinner yet, so I walked him down to the cafeteria where he ate dinner. He was still hungry and asked for dessert, but I explained that it was late and the cafeteria was closing. He pouted a little and then decided to move on. This behavior seemed interesting to me, as I had never experienced a patient that had such a reaction. After that we went back to his room and I helped him get settled in for bed. Immediately, he began refusing to cooperate. He threw a tantrum stomping his feet and saying he was not tired. I explained that it was late and that his parents wanted him to get some rest, but he refused claiming he was scared and that he did not want to sleep alone. This was when the real behavior issues started.

I tried to persuade him to climb into bed but he approached the bed and threw the covers onto the floor instead. At this point he was stomping and shouting as loud as could that he wanted his mother and did not want to be here. I tried to explain that he was only here for the night, but his behavior was getting more and more violent. I finally called for assistance to help calm him down. The assistance staff took him out of the room and held him in a chair so that we could talk. Realizing that he was not going to get his way, the man started cooperating and agreed to lay in bed and go to sleep. We escorted him back to his room after he was laying in bed I left the room and went to my station to write up the report for why I needed to call for assistance.

After an hour I heard some noise coming from his room, so I went in to check on him. Instead of sleeping, he had spent the entire hour tearing pictures out of magazines and spreading them around the room. When I asked him what he was doing, he explained the room was too empty and he need to decorate it. I reminded him that it was nighttime and he needed to go to sleep at which point he began throwing another tantrum and shouting for his mother. This time he became so excited that he wet himself. I called for assistance and we calmed him down again and located a pair of pajamas for him to change into. I once again told him to lay down in bed and go to sleep.

This time he openly refused, so I tried to offer a compromise. His parents had mentioned that he liked Disney movies, so I put a movie on the television in his room and told him if he wanted to watch the movie, he would have to lay down. He smiled and agreed and laid down to watch the movie. By this time it was nearly midnight and the man had not slept at all. I went back to my station to add another note to the evening's report. His room was quiet for awhile, so I figured he must have finally gotten to sleep.

Around 1:00 I went in to check on the man and he was still awake, watching the movie which was just ending. He asked to watch another movie so I put another movie on the television for him. I noticed that he seemed uncomfortable, so I asked whether he needed to use the bathroom, to which he replied he did. I escorted him to the bathroom and waited for him to go. After about 15 minutes he had not come out of the bathroom, so I went in to check on him. To my surprise, he had finished using the bathroom but was not playing with the water from the sink, making puddles all over the bathroom. While my first thoughts were to react with shock and horror because he could have hurt himself by slipping and falling, I took a minute to pause and gauge my reaction. Knowing that disapproval would cause another tantrum, I escorted him back to his room and started the movie. Once the movie was on, I phoned for maintenance to come clean up the bathroom. Thankfully, the man finally fell asleep after the movie, around 3:00 in the morning. He slept until his parents came to pick him up at 9:00 in the morning.