DEMENTIA

Dementia: Symptoms, Treatments and Cure



Dementia: Symptoms, Treatments and Cure

Introduction

The purpose of this essay is to discuss the care of a service user I nursed during my placement in a mental health hospital for older adults with dementia. The essay will go further to explore the mental condition of the service user, the causes of sickness and any recovery strategies require to improve the service user's care based on long and short-term goals. The recovery process will follow a care plan, which will also highlight on the service users strengths and weakness. The importance of confidentially will be taken into consideration with reference to the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC 2008), which in this case the patient will be known as Mrs. Zee and practice unit will be name as Home. Gibbs G (1988) model of reflection will be used to show how this scenario has impacted and influence my idea of nursing and will also critically evaluate this recovery plan, in terms of identifying possible drawbacks or issues, areas which can be improved in the future. The primary purpose of this is to draw conclusions, which will lead to a better and more effective creation and application of care plans for my future patients or service users. The final section of the document will summarize the information provided, and gives several conclusions aimed mostly to the overall improvement of my future conduct and approach to the practice, which can be used to make me a better professional.

Discussion

Dementia is a very common disorder for the elderly population. In Great Britain (GB) alone, the number of people that suffer from dementia accounts for over 60% of the total elderly population, and their number exceeds 360,000 (UK National Audit Office, 2007). GB Statistics also shows that over 30% of these people eventually die from the disorder (van der Steen, 2010). These numbers indicate the importance of the disorder and the provision of adequate care for it more than clearly.

The word disorder has been deliberately chosen here, as dementia does not represent a disease by itself. It is actually a term used for the description of a set of symptoms, and it has also been referred to as a neurocognitive disorder (Mace and Rabins, 2011). There are three common causes of dementia which also identify the dementia types: the Alzheimer's disease, vascular dementia and lewy body dementia. What is characteristic for the disorder is that the symptoms displayed, and their duration may vary significantly from one person to another. These symptoms usually represent a decline in the mental capacity of the patient which affects the thinking, memory, concentration, ability for problem solving, and perception. In other words, the symptoms of dementia express gradual changes in the ability of the patients to remember events, faces, and names, to find way in places that are familiar, to communicate or to understand the others, to think, to perform common everyday activities and to make judgments and informative and logical decisions (Moore, ...