Challenges and Responses to Improving Geriatric Nursing Care Essay

Challenges and Responses to Improving Geriatric Nursing Care - Essay Example Therefore, there is not only shortage of nurses to deal with the old aged, but also poor services offered by practicing nurses. There is need for colleges to equip nursing students with skills to enable them perform optimally when serving the old. Incorporating practical sessions and internship will help a great deal in improving their knowledge. Experience gathered during internship provides one with a chance to practice handling the old age at an early age, and thus perform better latter at work. It is therefore necessary to understand the needs of the old aged, and how best to deal with them. From research, nurses who have interacted with the old people understand them better, communicate with them effectively and are able to attend to them comfortably and effectively. Discussion Nursing education and practice for the aged challenges The number of old-aged people seeking health care facilities is rising with no or minimal changes in the number of nurses specialized in the field. A ccording to Hickman, University of Western Sydney and Newton (2007), most of the nurses attending to the old people have no special training. Therefore, apart from the shortage of nurses trained in dealing with the old, the already practicing nurses are offering substandard services to the old aged. This is because they lack professional competence in that area. Various reasons have contributed to reduced number of people training in gerontological studies, (Vincent, 2012). For instance, education institutions are faced with the challenge of handling large numbers of students. This leads to difficult in the institution offering the required facilities to the learners, hence leading to inadequate education. As such, nurses graduating from such institutions are not fully prepared to handle the elderly. Additionally, students find it difficult to pursue education program on care giving to the old age due to complexity of research projects undertaken in the field (Shellman, 2012). Moreo ver, studying gerontology is expensive, thus not affordable to some people. The nursing services for the old aged are quite costly making them unaffordable to a majority of the population. Due to health complication associated with old age, the elderly have frequent visits to health facilities thus, take a quantitative amount of their income. Additionally, most of the health care institutions cannot afford quality facilities for providing high quality services to the elderly. University of Western Sydney and Halcomb (2007) suggests that huge costs are required to equip the institutions with the facilities. As such, due to monopoly, institutions that have such facilities transfer the cost to the clients in form of increased health care fees. The cultural norms influence nurses in learning and carrying out their daily assignments. For example, there is a belief that the old age is characterized with diseases and sicknesses. In actual sense, there are old people who are healthy and do not have frequent body complications. As such, given the required attention and care, they are able to perform normally. From a different perspective, the elderly have values that differ from those of the youths, due to age difference and experience (Fox, 2013). This differences lead to a challenge when a young nurse is dealing with an old aged person. The disparity result to conflict and discomfort, and consequently leads to ineffectiveness in service delivery. Cultural differences are present when people