Assignment 2: Practicum – Week 6 Journal Entry

Reflect on geriatric patients from your practicum site that you may have assessed for dementia, delirium, or depression. Explain the impact of these types of disorders on frail elders. Then, describe a patient case including the care plan for assessment, diagnoses, treatment, management, and patient education. Explain whether the patient’s care plan was effective. Include how you might proceed differently in the future. If you did not have an opportunity to evaluate a patient with this background during the last 6 weeks, you can select a related case study or reflect on previous clinical experiences.

ANSWER

Geriatric patients

A geriatric patient is an old individual usually above seventy-five years with an impaired overall functioning of the body. The elderly typically need maximum support from the community both physically and emotionally to help them through their final stage of life. Dementia, delirium, and depression are common disorders which affects senior citizens. Dementia is the negative effect on mental abilities and memory which affects the daily life of an individual. Delirium leads to confusion in thinking and reduces the awareness of the surrounding environment (Yaghmour, Gholizadeh and Alsenany, 2016). Additionally, depression is a mood disorder depicted by insomnia, unhappiness and loss of interest in certain tasks.

All the three disorders affect the elderly mentally and tempers with their judgment. The diseases, therefore, lead to poor concentration, destruction, inability to reason clearly, solve problems the right way and difficulty in learning new things. Affected elderly are also not able to keep safe with appliances and can easily hurt themselves when exposed to dangerous materials. The art of socialization is reduced, and inappropriate responses and behaviors emerge (Villumsen et al., 2015). Other impacts include mood swings, personality change, anger and frustration and overactive response to changes in stimuli.

Scenario In a certain home for the elderly, a dementia case was suspected in one of the geriatric patients. To be sure that the elderly was experiencing this disorder, the nurse had to go through medical history of the patient. Cognitive testing, laboratory tests and imaging helps in diagnosis of dementia. Physical examination was carried out, daily functioning and how the patient relates with others was also assessed (Yaghmour, Gholizadeh and Alsenany, 2016). After all the assessment it was concluded that the patient had dementia which…