only a few weeks left!!!!

These were the old people that I will tell you about.
Beckham is learning the art of quilting with my mother. He is picking it up so fast.

For the service-learning project in another class we went to Seville senior center and talked to the people living there about preventing dementia. It is important for older adults to keep their mind sharp with brain exercises. Also they need to provide their brain with plenty of fresh oxygen through exercise. We also provided them with an assortment of crossword puzzles, word searches, and Sudoku. To keep them sharp.

WHAT? We got to the senior center and there was a little auditorium all set up for us with about twenty-five percent of the chairs filled, which were about five people. (I think a few of them were sitting there just because there was a seat available). The most important thing that I gained from this was that the older people had a real large knowledge deficit when it came to knowing about dementia. A lot of them did not even know what it was! Or they had heard of it but didn’t know what it did exactly; they just knew that it was bad. This was important for me to learn because dementia is a common thing in older adults, so you assume that they know about it. However as a nurse I need to teach people about their health care and if they don’t know something and I don’t teach them because I assume that they know it; it could have bad consequences.

SO WHAT? This experience helped me as a student nurse because it showed me how to teach a group better. I have never taught something and had everyone that I was teaching be on so many different levels. It was hard to talk about a basic principle and not have one or two people not know what I was talking about. This it as a large challenge in and of it self. I feel that it is good for me as a student nurse to get these kinds of problems resolved sooner rather then later.

NOW WHAT? As a nurse in the future I will have be very attentive and observant to the needs of my patients for teaching. I can’t assume that people already know what I am talking about. For example, while in the hospital after the birth of our baby the nurse was in charge of teaching us before discharge. This was our first child and so naturally we had a lot of questions. However, because our nurse knew that my wife was a nurse on labor and delivery she assumed that we knew a lot about our baby and she did not answer the questions that we had. Needless to say we figure out the answers to some of our questions, but we looked them up online and not from a great resource like the nurse would have been able to give us. So as a nurse I need to make sure that my patients have all the information that they want, so as to not let them leave with unanswered questions.