Teaching care of older people: Puzzles of a teacher

How does one teach a nursing student how to care for older people, when that student has very little experience interacting with older adults? When I ask my students if their grandparents are still living, many say they are not. Or, if they are, they don’t see them much.

So most of them are getting their notions about people of advanced years from popular culture—television, news, YouTube, etc.—or through their experiences with older people admitted into hospitals where the students are assigned for clinical learning. Younger people nowadays do not know older people the way people of my generation did, and they have limited opportunities to interact with them.

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If a deeper kind of learning is achieved only through experience, how do we help young people learn how to care for the old, when they don’t really “mingle” with them in their daily lives? How do I, as a teacher, help students appreciate the heterogeneity of seniors as individuals when students have perceptions, coming from popular culture, that more often than not are caricatures of certain behaviors seen in elderly people?

Of course, I try. I try to convince them that older people are not necessarily weak, needy, and cranky. I invite seniors to come to my classes and share their stories. My students are in awe of what they learn from these stories. They learn about people over age 80 who volunteer to help others in need. They never thought seniors could be like that. Another story—an individual close to age 90 who still hikes regularly and for long hours, a person who is much stronger than those much younger. My students listen in disbelief. Some even tell me they are inspired.

To foster intergenerational relationships, we need to begin with the basics—getting to know each other in our daily lives. A regular semester in Hong Kong is 14 weeks. How do we teach students who do not really know older people to develop the right kind of attitude and accumulate the knowledge they need in just three-and-a-half months? Is that “mission impossible” for teachers of gerontology?

I don’t think studying hard facts about age-related physiological changes in the aging body will help younger people better appreciate the needs of those who are growing old. Neither do I think that teaching students about common plights faced by older people—concepts such as cascade iatrogenesis, functional incontinence, and atypical presentation of illness—will make them better nurses in caring for the aged.

Well, I try. I try to cultivate awareness in my students of issues related to aging and older people by asking them to write journals throughout the semester. I ask them to write a brief note each week about news reports or incidents they have seen or heard about elderly people that intrigue or fascinate them. By asking students to actively look for such reports on a regular basis, I hope to sharpen their awareness about age and aging in the world around us.

Only when one starts to look will one begin to see. And only when we start “seeing” matters related to age and aging will we begin to ask questions. Questions lead to deeper reflections about ourselves and others. It is the first step that may lead to changes in us and, I hope, to changes in the environment that emanates from us.

For Reflections on Nursing Leadership (RNL), published by the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International. Comments are moderated. Those that promote products or services will not be posted.