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walkitouthttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/health/24nursing.html
Well, pretty good. Neat idea, to have geriatrics students go live in a nursing home for a while. If the takeaway is a concern about getting too attached and being devastated by the deaths of the people one has learned to love, I figure the students are doing a great job. I am a _little_ concerned that one of the students was surprised to learn that patients at the skilled nursing facility thought of it as their home, and the staff as a second family. Duh, much?
If we're really serious about making end-of-life a better experience, this is where our focus should be: on making skilled nursing facilities more comfortable _homes_ where people can live with what has made it increasingly impossible for them to live anywhere else. The knowledge that comes from personal experience of these spaces can form the basis of an intelligent compassion that is a large chunk of what we need to get there.
Well, pretty good. Neat idea, to have geriatrics students go live in a nursing home for a while. If the takeaway is a concern about getting too attached and being devastated by the deaths of the people one has learned to love, I figure the students are doing a great job. I am a _little_ concerned that one of the students was surprised to learn that patients at the skilled nursing facility thought of it as their home, and the staff as a second family. Duh, much?
If we're really serious about making end-of-life a better experience, this is where our focus should be: on making skilled nursing facilities more comfortable _homes_ where people can live with what has made it increasingly impossible for them to live anywhere else. The knowledge that comes from personal experience of these spaces can form the basis of an intelligent compassion that is a large chunk of what we need to get there.