Executive Summary for Acute Care for Elderly

Executive Summary for Acute Care for Elderly

Current state of Acute Care

Acute care is the care provided for patients suffering from long term illness or those who have had a server incident. This type of care for the elderly is provided to patients who have just had a surgery and are still in the recovery phase or those who need urgent medical condition. Traditionally, it has been observed that acute care for the elderly has failed to take into account the complex needs of the elderly patients (Brand, 2011). The paper presents an executive summary of Acute Care for Elderly (ACE) by discussing the effectiveness of the care when compared with the global outcomes, the occupational stress for those involved in the care and the ethical dilemmas associated with it such as patient confidentiality.

Effectiveness of ACE

In order to study the effectiveness of ACE model, it is imperative to highlight the global objectives that underlie the approach of this type of care. One of the major objectives of ACE model is to help the healthcare organizations in the US reduced the cost of care provided for the hospital. This does not mean a compromise on the quality of care, but refers to the need to free those thousands of beds that are currently being used by elderly patients under acute care. One of the ways of achieving this objective which is also parallel with another objective of the ACE model is to devise interventions that reduce the length of stay. The shorter the time period spend in the hospital, the better it is for both the hospital as well as the patient (Nizami & Rafique, 2006).

Another very important measure of ACE model effectiveness is the readmission rate. The lower the aforementioned rate, the better is the perceived quality of care provided. In this case, it is imperative to state that it is not always essential that a readmission indicates a flaw in the care provided. This means that some patients are really so ill that no matter what a doctor does, they will still face problems. The discharge rate of some of the hospitals as well as the discharge reasons is illustrated hereunder.

Occupational stress

Occupational stress refers to the stress that a person may feel because of the nature of his/her job. The role of a nurse in the provision of care is often underestimated, but really it is a very stressful job. This is so because nurses spend more time with the patients on average than all the others involved in the provision of care. The stress reported by nurses is so high that educational programs have been designed to teach them healthy coping mechanisms (Ahmed, 2010).

One of the sources of stress is lack of motivation. After a while, the nurses feel that their work has become monotonous. Every single day of their job is the same. Every single morning, they do not know what is it that they will ...