The Gerontology Explosion
Aging is a normal process that occurred through the course of life, we are born, grow, mature and get old which is believe to be a closer stage to our end of life. In the past, people were dying at a very young age and we had less numbers of older populations and today the aging population keeps increasing as a result of better medical care present today. According to the National Institute of Health, (2007), in 2006 the world population age 65 and above was 500 million and by 2030 these population is going to see an increase to one billion. The purpose of this post is to understand the term gerontological nurse, reasons fewer students chose gerontology and what would increase their interest in this area of study. Gerontology is the …show more content…
Some of them think that working in an environment with older people is depressing as everyone is in the process of dying. Given the above reasons many student choose to specialize in other disciplines like working in the emergency department, obstetric nursing (OB), pediatric etc. The above example was seen during my time in school, most of my classmates said they are not going to work in nursing homes where the largest populations were older adults because of the nurse to patient ratio and the physical demands. I was in line with them because where I did my clinical, the patient to nurse ratio was one nurse to thirty patients and if there was a call off, the nurse work with about fifty to sixty patients. So I said to myself how can a nurse provide quality care to all of these residents, the nurse might even pass out by the end of the day; this was very discouraging for me from taking gerontology as a specialty in the future, (Tabloski, Patricia
Aging is a normal process that occurred through the course of life, we are born, grow, mature and get old which is believe to be a closer stage to our end of life. In the past, people were dying at a very young age and we had less numbers of older populations and today the aging population keeps increasing as a result of better medical care present today. According to the National Institute of Health, (2007), in 2006 the world population age 65 and above was 500 million and by 2030 these population is going to see an increase to one billion. The purpose of this post is to understand the term gerontological nurse, reasons fewer students chose gerontology and what would increase their interest in this area of study. Gerontology is the …show more content…
Some of them think that working in an environment with older people is depressing as everyone is in the process of dying. Given the above reasons many student choose to specialize in other disciplines like working in the emergency department, obstetric nursing (OB), pediatric etc. The above example was seen during my time in school, most of my classmates said they are not going to work in nursing homes where the largest populations were older adults because of the nurse to patient ratio and the physical demands. I was in line with them because where I did my clinical, the patient to nurse ratio was one nurse to thirty patients and if there was a call off, the nurse work with about fifty to sixty patients. So I said to myself how can a nurse provide quality care to all of these residents, the nurse might even pass out by the end of the day; this was very discouraging for me from taking gerontology as a specialty in the future, (Tabloski, Patricia