Medical Care to Geriatric Alcoholic Patients

Nurses play a critical role in public education regarding the assessment of medical problems related to alcoholism or alcohol abuse. Nurses must assess their personal attitudes toward the disease concept of alcoholism before they can effectively provide services to geriatric patients who are alcoholics or who abuse alcohol. Among the geriatric population, there is a constellation of medical problems related to alcoholism and alcohol abuse. Potentially dysfunctional attitudes exist among nurses and other health-care professionals who are involved in the provision of medical care to geriatric patients who have alcoholism or who abuse alcohol. (p. 26)

In other words, a major function of the nursing role is to provide geriatric alcoholics with both treatment and prevention services and it is likely that dysfunctional attitudes may impair this care. In order to examine Parette, Hourcade and Parette's (1990) claim regarding the possibility of dysfunctional attitudes toward geriatric alcoholism in the nursing profession, this

thesis examined the attitudes of a group of community health nurses toward elderly alcohol abuse.

Further, because of the substantial research establishing that attitudes systematically covary with sociodemographic characteristics of the attitude holder (see: Lindgren & Harvey, 1996), the thesis also investigated whether nurse attitudes toward geriatric alcohol

. . .
hat time has a causal force underlies ageism, and the mere passage of time justifies discrimination. It is suggested that public policy could be improved if it moves from being "age-based" to being "needs-based." Using a pretest-posttest design, Downe-Wamboldt and Melanson (1990) explored as to whether nursing students, upon completion of their programs, had different attitudes toward the elderly than when they started in the program. Study participants included physiotherapy students (n=23) who comprised the control groups, postregistration nursing students (n=13), and four-year basic baccalaureate nursing students (n=39). Data were collected using the Opinions about People questionnaire, which consisted of five attitude dimensions. It was found that none of the student groups showed a significant change on the realistic toughness toward aging attitude, and that most scores reflected uncertainty on the denial of aging attitude. On the anxiety about aging attitude measure, posttest scores were lower than pretest scores for the physiotherapy and basic baccalaureate groups, which indicated an increase in anxiety. Posttest scores indicated that all three groups felt less socially distant to the elderly and believed more in fa
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Approximate Word count = 9493
Approximate Pages = 38 (250 words per page)

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