Guidelines for Individualizing Client Care across the Life Span

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According to statistics on employment by the economic sector in Ireland provided by the Central Statistics Office (2018), the biggest percentage of Irish citizens (26.7 percent) are employed in the sector of human health and social work activities. Besides, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic shows how important this sphere is. The current paper describes my work as a day shift care support assistant at the Bantry General Hospital.

The hospital has a broad area of specialization. For example, it has a surgical division, dietician, and diabetes clinics as well as provides palliative care. However, the planning processes at all of the divisions of the hospital and clinics are the same. The first step of a planning process is the assessment of a patient. Apart from analyzing the clients symptoms and the state of health, it is essential to gather information on his or her medical history, habits, hobbies, and social background. A specialist should know whether a patient lives alone or have friends or relative who could help during the rehabilitation period.

The second step of the planning process is discussing the expected outcome and peculiarities of the treatment with a patient.

Then, logically, the phase of implementation follows. The final step of the care planning is the control over a patients progress and regular observation of his or her health conditions. Doenges, Moorhouse, and Murr (2019) emphasize the importance of critical thinking in planning the care process. At the workplace, employees are obliged to follow this principle strictly. In other words, care assistants create individual care plans for every client and do not use universal patterns in every single case.

It is important to notice that in the provision of care support, the entire team of specialists is involved. Already at the stage of planning, a patient is observed not only by one nurse but several professionals depending on the symptoms and diagnoses. Besides, the implementation of care support is conducted not only by one assistant. A narrow specialist prescribes medicines and medical procedures and controls the progress of a client. It is impossible to imagine that the entire team is not engaged in the process. Hervey and Ramsay (2004) emphasize that carers could become vital partners in helping a patient, and that is why the hospital engages them as well. What is more, managerial personnel are an indispensable component of the general hospitals performance and the quality of the care provided to the clients. That is because communication between administration and the staff members is a tool to fix the existing problem, create a more convenient schedule and allocation of responsibilities, mitigate and resolve conflicts in the team.

Undoubtedly, the most significant resource used is personnel because the provision of decent help is unthinkable without qualified and experienced specialists. In addition to that, another significant resource used is medical equipment, including such consumables as bandages, syringes, and tongue depressors and specialized hardware such as sterilizers, sphygmomanometers, thermometers, weights, oxygen masks, defibrillators, dialyzers, blood infusion sets, etc. Additionally, the hospital also possesses all the necessary equipment for surgeries, x-ray, MRI, electrocardiography, and blood, and other body liquid tests. The equipment is purchased for the subsidies from the government, private donations, and revenue of the hospital.

The activity of a care support assistant includes the provision of moral and physical support to the patients of the hospital. In some cases, as a worker, I visited some patients at home to check if their recovery goes as planned. Herber and Johnston (2013) write that care support workers frequently face the problem of psychological attachment to their clients. In the beginning, the provision of palliative care was a challenge precisely due to the issues with attachment. However, training that was conducted during the period of employment at the hospital taught me how to accept the deaths of other people and move on.

Unsurprisingly, clients are immensely involved in the caring process because they are the targets of care support workers activities. Still, it is essential to notice that clients are always encouraged to express their opinion and emotions in the process of care. For example, I have always tried to establish trusting relations with the clients because this could help to improve the quality of the care. Besides, genuine attention is of particular value for older adults. Frequently, these people have no relatives who are willing to take care of them and, therefore, in this case, the main task of a care support assistant is to involve the client in the process of care by establishing relations based on trust.

Emotional stability is a vital component of successful recovery. This way, the goal of activities conducted by care support workers is to help people staying at hospitals. As a result of such help, the client feels that they are not alone and that there are people whom they could rely on. From this, it could be inferred that the significant impact of the activity on the client is the creation of emotional stability and a supportive atmosphere.

The achievement of such effects is possible only through constant communication with a client. As it has been mentioned above, a care support worker should know everything about the fears, interests, and wants of a client. Furthermore, in the process of working with a client, a worker should communicate with him to know if there is something that makes him worried or something that should be fixed in the caring process. At this point, it is interesting to notice that older patients began to regard me as a close person or even a relative. Indeed, they felt so lonely that the attention of the care support assistant was a blessing for them. That is because they realized that they are not obliged to fight with a disease one-on-one. In addition to the communication with a client, I, as a care support assistant, had a dialogue with the medical personnel who provides nursing care to a client. Through communication with these people, I made adjustments to the developed plan of care support.

To conclude, it seems fair to say that my performance as a care support assistant lacks practical experience. Nonetheless, no critical mistakes have been made. Instead, I have understood what it means to provide individual help to people who are fighting with a mental or physical disease and have no one to rely on except themselves. The work that has been conducted was immensely hard in a psychological sense because it obliges to deal with peoples suffering on a daily basis. This experience taught me that a care support worker should not overreact and take personally everything that happens to clients.

Reference List

Central Statistics Office (2018). Women and Men in Ireland 2019. Web.

Doenges, M. E., Moorhouse, M. F., & Murr, A. C. (2019). Nursing care plans: Guidelines for individualizing client care across the life span. FA Davis.

Herber, O. R., & Johnston, B. M. (2013). The role of healthcare support workers in providing palliative and end‐of‐life care in the community: a systematic literature review. Health & social care in the community, 21(3), 225-235.

Hervey, N., & Ramsay, R. (2004). Carers as partners in care. Advances in Psychiatric Treatment, 10(2), 81-84.

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Guidelines for Individualizing Client Care across the Life Span

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