Help Your Community: Elderly Patients and Violence

Have you ever fallen victim to violence or hostile behavior by an elderly person? It's more common than you think, especially in nursing.

As a nurse, you want the best for your charges. You want to help, and are probably quick to dismiss hostile or rude comments from patients. Whether or not it's their dementia or Alzheimer's talking or not, the fact is that nurses need to take care of their own well-being, and that includes psychological well-being. Too many nurses fall prey to the same old cycle.

As an effort to help nurses identify these problems and relieve the burden, NursingLink is helping a nursing grad student named Gediminas G. conduct a dissertation study on the challenging behavior of elderly patients, and its effect on care providers.

In his own words:

"In the current study, challenging behaviours sometimes expressed by elderly people in care facilities will be investigated and the effect of these behaviours on nurses and care assistants psychological wellbeing will be explored.

The relationships between challenging behaviours, work stress, and job satisfaction will be researched, and the effect of personality factors and coping strategies used by the caring personnel examined.

Nurses and Care Assistants working with elderly people at non-NHS nursing homes, day care facilities or other establishments are asked to participate in the present study by filling in the research questionnaire. This study is likely to enhance the understanding of how caring for the elderly may impact on the wellbeing and job satisfaction of caring staff and ways of improving these factors and the quality of care."

Please give a few minutes of your time to participate in this worthy study. Perhaps we can all learn something from it.

To participate, email gediminas.grinevicius@study.beds.ac.uk asking for a copy of the questionnaire.

Gediminas' findings will be posted in a future article on NursingLink.
Help Your Community: Elderly Patients and ViolenceOriginally from: http://www.nursinglink.monster.com/news/articles/9537-help-your-community-elderly-patients-and-violence

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