During my time at clinical this past semester, I encountered many different patients from various backgrounds. It was interesting to see where the different people came from and how different their circumstances were regarding their treatment outside of the hospital and other factors such as transportation and their living situation.
One patient that came to my mind after reading this prompt was an older man that I took care of and he was extremely sick. At the time I was taking care of him, he was a failure to thrive. He was so sick and could not eat or walk by himself and needed help from others. He lived at home with his wife who took care of him. He also had lost a lot of unintentional weight, which is not a good sign. He did not talk much, but from what I understood, he was not taking his medication because his doctor was retiring. He thought that he would never be able to get his cardiac medications again because he would not be able to see that specific doctor again. He ended up having to go to the hospital to get diuresed since the congestive heart failure had gotten bad. This situation was interesting to me because I do not know if it was because he was older and did not understand what was happening or if this occurred because his doctor was not being clear with this patient and he legitimately thought that he could not go see another doctor to get his medications. Another thing to think about is the cost of these medications. Medication is unfortunately extremely expensive and not many people are able to afford them. This could also have been a possibility for this patient. I did not get much on his background, but there is a high chance that he was also not able to afford the medication.
I think that the staff at his doctors office could have done a better job. This patient clearly did not understand what was going on with his doctors and I think that they should have provided this patient with more information regarding the doctors retirement and resources for him to be able to find another doctor as well. Another thing that the staff could have done was a teach-back method for this patient and provided him with written information in order for him to be able to access it at a later time. Healthcare for elderly patients is complicated already and I think that we as nurses and other healthcare professionals need to do a better job at providing care for these special populations and making sure that they are getting the proper care that they need. Policy makers also need to do better in these situations not only for the older population, but in general. The cost of medication and healthcare is so high that not many people can afford this “luxury”. It is unfortunate that having adequate access to healthcare is not universal. This is most likely the reason that our country has so many health problems and deaths related to diseases that many other countries don’t have.
