Gerontology was such a great class for me to experience during my time in college. Going into it I thought I had learned everything I needed to know about care since taking Adult Health 3, but this was wrong.
One huge insight I took on this class is that care really is specialized person to person. In school, you are taught that there are set interventions and therapeutic techniques to help with each patient, but you also must remember to think outside of the box as a nurse because they circumstance for each patient can change. For example, in this class he did virtual realities which put you in the perspective of the patient getting care and I think this helped a lot with giving individualized care. This helped because it made me experience care from a patient who has vision problems or hearing problems that needed to have different aspects of their care changed, whether it was a vision board or using certain sound cues to realize the nurse was in the room. Therefore, as the nurse; it is extremely important to not be so task oriented and make sure you can take whatever curve balls are thrown at you because one patient may seem easy to take care of because they don’t have vision or hearing problems, but you have to tailor that care to the elderly population.
Another huge takeaway I took from this class was the stereotypes and the myths about elderly that are just completely not true. It is important as the nurse to realize what is a normal part of aging and what can just go overlooked as a normal part of aging that could be an underlying problem that needs to be further investigated. There were many findings in the elderly that people mistake for normal signs of aging when they can be a medical problem, and this can be extremely frustrating as the patient if you know something is wrong, but others are not looking into it enough. Also, assumptions made that elderly are bitter, rude and upset all the time are extremely false and if that is the personality of the patient, they were probably like that way before that, and this is usually due to something in their life that causes these emotions so it is important to treat them like we would any normal patient.
It was extremely insightful to take Gerontology and Pediatrics at the same time during the semester because you got to see how similar they really are and how they are both populations that need specialized care and it is just the outlook that people have on them that are different. Both populations have different needs and wants but both need extreme care and attention and someone older should be taken just as seriously as an infant who was just brought into the world. This class has taught me so many things on Gerontology and just nursing in general that I will continue to practice in my nursing career.
