AGEISM OR REVERSE AGEISM

Ageism or Reverse Ageism



Ageism or Reverse Ageism

Introduction to the problem

This assignment will discuss Equal Opportunities in the context of care for older people. This will include whether or not the elderly receive the same standard of care as younger people do and the provision of services for older patients, however as described by Nichol (1998) in Nursing Knowledge and Practice (Mallik, Hall and Howard) providing the same quality of care to people of all ages, including the old would be a drain on limited resources because the elderly are seen as unproductive and have a reduced ability to be socially useful, (Redfern, 1991). The aim of the assignment is to concentrate on and discuss questions that were raised within a group discussion about Equal Opportunities and ageism.

These questions included; 'who decides whether it is worth giving elderly patients treatment', 'just because the person is older should they be refused care/treatment', 'who has the right to decide whether patients get the chance of life or not, (DNR orders)' and 'are nurses equipped, by their training, to provide adequate specialist care for the elderly. This is set to be facilitated by Standard 4 of the National Service Framework (NFS) for older people, which state that older people's care in hospitals should be delivered through appropriate specialist care and by hospital staff who have the right set of skills to meet their needs.

Literature review

These questions were raised through recalling situations which we have come across during our placements and two particularly good examples of how we are failing to offer Equal Opportunities to all are, the 'Do Not Resuscitate' orders that doctors discuss about patients who are unable to make the decision for themselves, and a specialist decision to withdraw treatment within a haematology clinic. In this case the patient was a 66-year-old gentleman who had contracted a type of leukaemia that left him anaemic. It was then discussed the best ways that the anaemia could be treated and became apparent that there were two treatments that could have been effective. One was to treat the cause of the anaemia and offer the patient a bone marrow graft and the other was to treat the effects of the illness and offer the patient regular blood transfusions in order to 'boost' his red blood cell counts.

The cost of the treatment was consequently discussed and it was found that the cost of having the bone marrow graft far outweighed the benefits of having it. This was explained because the patient was the age that he was and would no longer be in employment and this would mean that they would be able to regularly attend clinic for the transfusions, whereas if the patient was younger and still employed they would have been more likely to receive the graft as this would be less disruptive. Also, as explained by Beauchamp and Childress (1994), in Clarke (2001), age is often used as an indicator of the probability of a treatment being ...