Institutional Affiliatio Paper

The Body

It is evident that it is the responsibility of the nurses to keep the patient comfortable. The older or aging population are vulnerable group partly because they lack the resources to seek for health care services for the increased medical chronic conditions. Even for the healthcare providers, it is difficult to establish which disease or condition to treat. The family or people that have the resources to assist them, might feel that because of their age, it is of little importance to invest time and finances on them. Some people do not see any sense of investing in a person that has a short time to live. Therefore, with their helplessness, the nurses should work closely with them to fight for their rights to gain access to medical care. The code of ethics for nurses assist nurses in carrying out their complex daily duties. According to these codes, nurses need to provide special care and attention to elderly patients (Zahedi, et al., 2013).

Other than streamlining the decision making process with regards to healthcare, challenges faced by the aging population can be addressed by directing and setting aside more resources to addressing the needs of these population in an earlier stage to improve the healthcare outcomes. Moreover, it is evident that with the rate at which the aging population is increasing the number of available healthcare practitioners will not be enough. However, the research argues that a shortage in the number of nurses does not mean that there are not enough trained personnel but that the available nurses are not willing to engage in offering care to this population (Buchan & Aiken, 2008). Buchan and Aiken (2008) also identify poor recruitment and retention, inadequate planning and allocation of the workforce, and resource constraints as other factors resulting in the shortage. Therefore, increasing the number of healthcare workers is only part of the solution to the problem. It will also be important to have this population adopts healthier behaviors.