Assignment: Geriatric patients in your practicum setting.

Assignment: Geriatric patients in your practicum setting.

As a future advanced practice nurse, it is important that you are able to connect your classroom experience to your practicum experience. By applying the concepts you study in the classroom to clinical settings, you enhance your professional competency. Each week, you complete an Assignment such as a Journal Entry or SOAP Note that prompts you to reflect on your practicum experiences and relate them to the material presented in the classroom. This week, you begin documenting your practicum experiences in your Practicum Journal. To prepare for this course’s Practicum Experience, address the following in your practicum journal:

Select an aging theory to guide your practice.
Develop goals and objectives for the Practicum Experience in this course. Be sure to consider geriatric competencies.
Create a timeline of practicum activities based on your practicum requirements.

Week 2 Journal

To prepare for this course’s Practicum Experience, reflect on implications of age-related changes in geriatric patients. Explain how you might differentiate between normal behaviors/disorders due to aging and abnormal behavior/disorders that are not age related. Include how functional assessments might help distinguish “normal” from “abnormal.”

Week 4 Journal

Reflect on medication adherence issues you have encountered with geriatric patients in your practicum setting. Explain implications of these issues on patient health, as well as strategies to improve medication adherence for geriatric patients. If you did not have an opportunity to evaluate a patient with this background during the last 4 weeks, you can select a related case study or reflect on previous clinical experiences.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.