How Nurse Practitioners Enhance Elderly Care and Well-Being

Over the last several decades, elderly care has become an increasingly important focus in the healthcare sector. As the world is evolving, so is the way society views how elderly care should be provided. Specifically, more people — both in healthcare and outside of it — are now more focused on ensuring that older adults experience an increased sense of well-being while receiving care.

Today, nurse practitioners are being looked to as a possible healthcare resource for older adults receiving medical care. Understanding the ways that nurse practitioners can improve the patient experience for scores of older adults is crucial for understanding the ways that healthcare can evolve in the modern age.

Here is how nurse practitioners enhance elderly care and well-being.

Ensuring All Older Adults Receive the Care They Need

As we delve deeper into the future, the elderly population is continuing to grow at a significant rate. As a result of this growing patient population, more and more healthcare professionals are beginning to worry about the shortage of professional healthcare workers able to serve these patients.

Beyond everyday care, many are worried that it will soon be apparent that there are not enough physicians available to serve the increasing health-related needs of the aging population. Fortunately, modern nursing careers are extraordinarily specialized and diverse, providing a wide range of demographics with specialized care.

From geriatric nurse practitioners to family nurse practitioners, many of these advanced nurses are qualified and capable of providing full care to older adults. As a result, many see nurse practitioners as a key piece of the solution to the problem of increasing provider shortages.

Providing Home Health Care to Elderly Patients

Home health care is an incredibly important form of medical care for the elderly population. The reason for this is that many older adults are unable to make frequent visits — or any visits at all — to healthcare facilities in order to receive treatments, check-ups, and care.

Fortunately, home health professionals are trained to provide care to patients in the comfort of patients’ own homes. This makes receiving adequate care far more conducive for older adults with limited mobility and a range of age-related ailments.

Nurse practitioners have the power to travel to patients’ homes and provide them with the care that they need. In addition, depending on the state they practice in, some nurse practitioners prescribe medication to their patients. For an increasingly large elderly population, this means that nurse practitioners have the power to enhance patient well-being and satisfaction for a vast array of people.

Caring for Patients with Chronic Conditions

As time goes on and the elderly population becomes significantly larger than in past generations, it’s becoming clear that certain approaches to treating chronic conditions are more effective than others. Specifically, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that healthcare professionals are better able to care for older patients with chronic ailments when they work together.

Nurse practitioners can play a key role in these collaborations, helping both primary care physicians and home health nurses treat specific patients more effectively. As such, it’s becoming clear that the future of elderly care will involve teams that include nurse practitioners with specialized skill sets that can help contribute to a better patient experience for scores of older adults.

Intervening in Unsafe Behavior

While it can be a disheartening truth to accept for many older adults, aging can significantly impact the number of activities that elderly adults can engage in safely. This includes activities such as driving, sports, and, in many cases, even walking. As such, without intervention, many older adults may be at risk of inadvertently harming both themselves and other people.

Nurse practitioners, however, have the skills to assess the abilities of their elderly patients and intervene when they believe that they’re engaging in unsafe activities. This means that nurse practitioners have the power to prevent an untold number of serious accidents from happening to their elderly patients.

This can include accidents such as falling and being involved in a serious car accident. Consequently, nurse practitioners can profoundly improve patient well-being by intervening before a significant accident occurs as a result of patients engaging in unsafe behaviors.

Nurse Practitioners Are the Future of Elderly Care

Though many new and innovative solutions have the power to help solve the problem of elderly care, it’s becoming increasingly clear that nurse practitioners will be part of the solution. Bringing a specialized skill set and unique insights to the table, nurse practitioners have the ability to greatly improve the patient experience for scores of older adults and change the way healthcare functions in the United States.