sábado, 6 de abril de 2013

3.2 Global assessment of aging: Functional assessment

The functional assessment is a process aimed at collecting information about the capabilities of the elderly to perform their usual activities while maintaining their independence.
The normal activities of the elderly (and people in general) can be classified into two groups:

  • Activities of daily living (ADL): are those that are closely related to self-care (feeding, dressing, grooming, ambulation, continence and communication) àThe scales that we use for the assessment of ADL are: the index of activities of daily living (Katz), the Barthel Index, the level of disability of the red cross and the Plutchik scale.
  • Instrumental activities of daily living (IADL): are those that require a higher level of personal autonomy (writing, reading, cleaning, cooking, medication management and money management) àThe scale that we use for evaluation is the Lawton and Brody index.

When the elderly start to have problems related to the inability of performing these activities, it is important that they have the help of a caregiver (who may be his / her spouse, child or a person hired for this task).

The primary caregiver is the person who is responsible for daily support and care of patients with dementia. The problem that arises is that the attention and tasks will increase progressively over the disease, so there comes a point where you can see a series of physical, psychological and socio-family problems, which nowadays we known as: caregiver burden, so it is very important the preventive work, that we can carry out by Zarit scale.



I think that nursing plays a very important role at the time to recognize when there's a problem of overloading the primary caregiver of an elder with dementia. I think it's very important that there an early detection of this problem, since, as a result, the elderly can be neglected.




Bibliography
  • Fisterra. [Monografía de internet]. [Fecha de consulta 2 de abril de 2013]. Disponible en: http://www.fisterra.com/guias-clinicas/atencion-al-cuidador-paciente-con-demencia/



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