Nursing Paper Example: What Are the Health Literacy Challenges Faced by Elderly Individuals?

One of the main conditions that must be met for effective care, especially for the elderly patients is literacy. It plays a critical role especially for the gerontology nurses who take care of the old. For this reason, comprehending the health literacy challenges associated with caring for the elderly is vital for older adult patients. The studys goal was to gain insights into health-related challenges from gerontology nurses. From the study, it was clear that even with the increased adoption of health and hospital information systems and electronic medical records, their effectiveness is hampered by low literacy. For this reason, gaining an understanding of the causes of the low literacy challenge will significantly promote the effective leveraging of information systems in the health sector. Besides, the study was vital in assessing the challenge of low literacy problem, thereby allowing for deeper understanding of the problem.

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Research Design Presentation and Limitations

Looking into the limitations of the research is vital as it offers gaps, which can be closed in similar studies in the future. The researchers employed a formative study and incorporated interviews into the study population. Even so, various limitations were identified. Firstly, the sample size of the respondents was small, and thus, this meant that the perspectives obtained might have been limited to the small sample, rather than the general population. Besides, the study only focused on individuals, rather than providers, which would have been important in understanding the challenge better. Also, the patients chose did not engage in various healthcare activities, if they did, more perspectives would have been drawn. In addition, literacy is affected by other variables, including peoples culture, economics, and social status.

Presentation of the Researchers Bias, Reflexibility, and Positionality.

Selecting population samples is important as it dictates the results of a study. The researcher should select a sample that is representative of the whole population, and thus, researchers should also consider populations from high and low social-economic status. However, in the research, the population considered was Latino, but also included African Americans, as wells South Americans, including people from the Caribbean and Caucasians, and Asians. The common characteristic of the sample was that the participants had a low socio-economic status. Therefore, the sample would have provided better perspectives if only there were a balance of people from both higher and lower socio-economic status were included as only one of the nurses worked affluent Caucasians.

Seven of eight interviewees highlighted the problem of health literacy. Only two of the eight nurses indicated that younger of the older adults could manage their health by coming to scheduled appointments and enquiring about their health status and were also had better health support systems and well-educated. Furthermore, from the research, three themes were common, which were related to the challenge of health literacy amongst the elderly patients. These included literacy obstacles, age-related problems, as well as inadequate social resources. In essence, these three were the main causes of the literacy challenge. Health literacy is promoted by being literate, mainly being able to read, write, as well as apply quantitative skills in the health sector. Besides, the age-related problems are primarily made of those challenges that come with aging, such as low inactivity while social resources are the supports necessary for sustaining life on a daily basis.

Reference

Matthews, L. A., Shine, A. L., Currie, L., Chan, C. V., & Kaufman, D. R. (2012). A Nurses Eye-View on Health Literacy in Older Adults. In 2012: Proceedings of the 11th International Congress on Nursing Informatics, 2012, 204.