Educating Nursing Staff and Love ones on Alzheimer's

Talia wiggled

English 1301

Ms. Tagore

5 May 2010

Educating Nursing Staff and Love Ones on Alzheimer’s

How would you feel if you decided to place a love one in a nursing because they have Alzheimer’s and the facility staff doesn’t have little education on this disease? I ask this question because, I am one of the staff members and I believe that there is a lot of needed education for staff in order to help us understand the process of the disease and help family members aware also.

It is very important to understand what may happen as the Alzheimer’s disease progress. I think if the staff was able to get some type of training on the things that could happen during the beginning we would be able to help family understand what stage they are in.

A lot of families don’t understand that their love one may start doing things that were not their norm and family members has never seen the patient do, they may start: have more memory loss, the patient may stop eating, become incontinent of bowel and bladder, forget whom their love one is, and also may even forget how to walk.

If the facility offers some type of education, the staff would be also able to understand a lot of the behaviors and how to approach the behaviors, a lot of time when resident stop eating the staff approach is to feed them but a lot of the resident won’t open their mouth and some may even let you put the food in their mouth and spit it out and at that very moment staff has zero understanding on why this patient hasn’t eaten in 3 weeks. The family is notified about their love one eaten pattern and at that moment the nurse is asked “why is my mom not eating she always had a great appetite, it must be that awful food that you all are serving her”, the nurse only reply is it is part of the disease process, which hasn’t answered the question at hand and in the mean while this patient has lost 5 pounds because we as a staff do not know how to treat this situation. The family also may be called because the resident gets up and try walking and they may fall because they forget how to, a lot of families gets upset stating “ya’ll must be short of staff because no one is watching my mom or dad”