Older Patient Reflection

The second thing I wish had been different is that I wish that I had learned more about how to talk about sensitive subjects, when I came back from the session I took a minute to read the chapter in the NIA booklet “Talking with your Older Patient” about sensitive subjects, but I did not seem to find the answers I wanted. When talking with our resident I realized that she had experienced a lot of loss in her life, her son, her grandson, and her sister. Although she played it off like it was not a big deal to her, I wish that I had known how to approach the conversation of asking what happened and what was your favorite memory with this person, instead of just letting her play it off. I think that many of her losses were long ago, so she …show more content…
Not a single one of our residents was able to hear everyone in the circle, they each said at least once that they had no idea what someone was saying, and I think that has a big impact on their social lives. If they cannot hear they might feel more isolated, even when they are in a big group. We have talked a lot in class about how this isolation, both the social from not being able to talk to as many people, and the perceived from not being able to hear the conversations around you can cause more adverse effects, and even dementia. Although the residents we had seemed pretty sound of mind, however I wonder how long they can remain in this state of isolation with no cognitive …show more content…
I went in to this experience not feeling very excited, as I have worked with my frail grandmother my whole life. I know that she can be cranky and tough, and I think that I was expecting a lot more of that. I know that currently my grandmother says “good bye and good riddance” to one of her nurses every time she leaves the house because my grandmother does not like her, so I was just scared to have residents who did not want to talk to people or who couldn’t talk to people due to hearing problems, as I know that hearing declines are common with ageing. However I left feeling a lot more comfortable with the elderly population, actually not even just with the elderly population, but probably patients in general. Although I know that that might be a grand over-generalization, I feel like if you are able to communicate with older people you should be able to communicate with everyone, because it is all about learning to find common ground, and that is harder to do the bigger the age gap. I also felt like the hearing wasn’t as big of an issue as I thought it was going to be. As our resident told us, you have two options when you get hearing aids, you can ask people to repeat what they are saying until you finally understand them, or you can just nod along and pretend you understand what they are saying. I am not sure if our resident always heard us, but I do know that she was able to still engage in conversation with us, so even