Serving Elderly Patients in Acute Care Facilities

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Geriatric Population

What is the best way to assure that older people are well cared for in an acute healthcare setting? What are the roles that nurses should play when it comes to providing the best possible care to older, frail people? These questions will be addressed in this paper using scholarly research from the available literature.

Advanced nursing skills for frail older people

Sarah Goldberg is a senior clinical academic nurse at the University of Nottingham's University Hospitals, and she writes in the journal Nursing Older People that an "innovative solution" in terms of providing the necessary skilled care to older people is to train experienced nurses to become "advanced nurse practitioners (ANPs) (Goldberg, 2014). An advanced nurse practitioner will be able to conduct comprehensive geriatric assessments, which will be important given that many very old and frail patients have "cognitive impairment, depression and anxiety," which can lead to a sense of apathy and cause delusions (Goldberg, 20).

The families of frail older people suffer from "high levels of stress" when they are taking their loved ones to the hospital; moreover, sometimes family members show anger about the care they received in previous interactions with healthcare providers, Goldberg explains (20). And so the need for extremely well trained and competent nurses -- in this case, nurse practitioners -- is acute when dealing with very old patients.

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In the UK, the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) has concluded that in order to meet the demands of the aging population -- in this case, geriatric patients with special needs -- what needs to happen is to train and hire "a new cadre of doctors" (Goldberg, 22). However, Goldberg insists that this conclusion is "…narrow in its vision"; what she suggests instead of the RCP suggestion to bring in a whole cadre of new doctors, Goldberg insists that training advanced nurse practitioners (22) is the answer.

The advanced nurse training should include skills in "…dementia and delirium, palliative care, continence, polypharmacy, rehabilitation and falls (Goldberg, 22).

Pilot study on acute care for the elderly

A peer-reviewed article in the Herd Journal points to a pilot project in a retirement community in Southern California included special attention for the very elderly by situating a six-bed acute care unit in a 33-bed medical-surgical unit (Krail, et al., 2012). The reason for this pilot program is that older hospitalized patients who "…do not….....

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