Assignment 2: Practicum – Week 8 Journal Entry

Reflect on geriatric patients from your practicum site. Consider frail elder patients that you have assessed for skin wounds such as bumps, bruises, shingles, herpes, bullous pemphigoid, Stevens-Johnson syndrome, etc. Explain the consequences of these types of wounds for 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 8 weeks, you can select a related case study or reflect on previous clinical experiences.

ANSWER

Assignment 2: Practicum-Week 8 Journal Entry

Skin Wounds in Geriatric Patients

Geriatric patients are elderly persons with the impaired overall functioning of the body system. At this stage in life, an individual usually has a fragile skin which heals slowly in case of an injury and sometimes it may never heal (Joseph et al., 2014). It calls for specialized care for the elderly from well-trained medical practitioners to handle any wounds appropriately incurred to avoid more severe infections.

Skin wounds take time to heal for the elderly affecting them both physically and emotionally. First, severe pain experiences from the injuries contribute to a lot of discomforts which tempers with the peace in their final stage of life. It goes to the extent of leading to early deaths than the expected time due to the stress and pain an individual feel. Social mobility for the elderly is also limited by the skin wounds which lead to social isolation. An individual remains alone with no one to share challenges (Hermanns & Waldhausen, 2017). Lack of support and help make the environment accommodating leads to the emergence of other illnesses which may lead to early death.

In the case an elderly individual is wounded, the first step in the healing process was identifying whether it is a chronic wound or just a scratch. Any injury has to be cleaned first before any medication is administered. To avoid infections, covering the wound is essential. It gives the body a chance to concentrate on healing the injury instead of fighting other diseases. Elderly individuals have a lot of dead skin which may interfere with the healing process of the wound (Greenhalgh, 2015). Therefore, I had to get rid of it around the injury to give the body the ability to heal. Bleeding of wounds is frequent in the elderly stage of life because of the weaker blood cells which form clots on the surface of the injury. Medication was administered to stop the bleeding which helped in closing the wound. To help in the healing process, I advised the elderly to try moving around and avoid sitting still for long hours. Keeping the body ac…