Growing numbers of nurses are working in long-term care and playing a major role in the provision of long-term care services. This book provides an overview of the unique aspects of long-term care with a specific focus on nurses working in nursing home and assisted living settings. It offers a review of the unique aspects and settings for long-term care, special needs of the population served, and clinical challenges. The book is divided into five parts. The first part provides the basics of long-term care with chapters covering nursing responsibilities, regulations, and cultural change. The nursing process is discussed in Part II, which focuses on the minimum data set (MDS), assessment needs beyond the MDS, assessment skills, creative care plans, person-centered care and family care. The challenges involved in clinical settings such as promotion of medication safety, and reduction of medication errors and common risks are dealt with in the third section. As a significant number of individuals who need long-term care services have cognitive impairment, Section IV is devoted to the care of residents with dementias. Management skills, legal risks, and issues pertaining to surveys are presented in Section V. In recognition of the stresses that can arise in long-term care nursing, a chapter is dedicated to the important topic of self-care.

This book provides innovative ways to incorporate aging content into courses, trainings, and workshops for students or professionals. It presents activities which offer hands-on approaches to engage students of all backgrounds–from social workers to family caregivers, medical students to demographers, nurses to community planners, personal care attendants to students in introduction to gerontology courses. These faculty-tested, peer-reviewed educational activities cover topics ranging from physical aging, media, and demographic portrayals of older adults to disaster planning, public policy, and diversity among older adults. The book includes 32 unique and interesting activities. Each activity comes with detailed instructions, basic back-ground information, a materials list, and an explanation of how the specific content aligns with one or more of the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education (AGHE) competencies for undergraduate and graduate education in gerontology. The book is divide into eleven chapters. The first chapter explores teaching courses on aging, and the potential of experiential learning activities to engage students. The second chapter discusses ageism and aging in the media. The next four chapters talk about dementia, demography, health care, and housing for older adults. The seventh chapter describes physical aging. Chapter 8 analyzes public policy and aging. Chapter 9 describes positive interactions with older adults. Chapter 10 explains research projects and papers, and the final chapter discusses spirituality.

Despite the increasing awareness of delirium as a cause of altered mental status, many of these patients will not be diagnosed as such. This book has evolved out of more than four decades of the author's gerontological nursing experiences caring for people with dementia in a wide range of clinical settings, including acute care, long-term care, and home and community settings. The basic premise is that although the short-term nature of the care setting focuses on nursing interventions for immediate medical problems, nurses have numerous opportunities to incorporate dementia-specific interventions in care plans. The second edition includes two new chapters on the Emotional Needs of People with Dementia and Self-Neglect and Elder Abuse. The book has eighteen chapters organized into six parts. Part I discuss types of dementia and other commonly occurring conditions that have similar manifestations; the chapters focus on nursing responsibilities for assessment and management of patients whose mental status is altered by underlying conditions such as dementia or delirium. Part II describes how nurses can apply a person-centered approach to address dementia-related issues. Part III discusses nursing care issues at various stages of dementia, and Part IV provides information about addressing emotional and behavioral issues. Part V describes considerations related to specific care settings and provides information about nursing strategies for daily care, safety, and pain. Chapters in Part VI are a guide to broader aspects of care for people with dementia, including self-neglect and elder abuse and ethical and legal issues. The last chapter discusses nursing strategies to address the needs of caregivers of people with dementia. A major emphasis throughout the text is on relatively simple interventions that nurses can incorporate in their discharge plans to teach families and care partners about sources of information and support to address the needs of people with dementia.

Across healthcare settings, older adults represent the majority of consumers served. They present with the most clinically and socially complex situations and thus require nurses to possess highly developed assessment competencies, critical thinking abilities, and relationship-based skills. Nurses have an enormous responsibility when providing care to older adults in this rapidly changing healthcare environment with its increasing regulatory requirements, variable staffing levels, and unpredictable reimbursement. Nurses also have an amazing opportunity to positively change the daily experiences and health of older adults. As in the previous editions, authors present up-to-date information on assessment and interventions for common health problems and geriatric syndromes. They expanded their robust clinical content to include evidence based approaches to support LGBTQ elders, persons living with dementia and their families, and older adults living with HIV. In this sixth edition, the authors provide guidelines that are developed by experts on the topics of each chapter and are based on the best available evidence. A systematic method, the AGREE (Appraisal of Guidelines for Research and Evaluation) process, was used to evaluate the protocols and identify a process to help the reader to improve the validity of the book’s content.