Accounting For Care: Documenting Residential Aged Care Nursing

Chapter 1: Accounting For Care - Documenting Residential Aged Care Nursing

Overview:

• Discusses the relationship between documentation and government funding
• Includes a discussion of nursing’s resistance towards documentation
• Debates whether the task of documentation can be integrated with the tasks of caregiving

Description:

This chapter explores the problem of documentation in nursing homes. The discussion commences with an overview of the major forces that influence written records of caregiving in nursing homes. It is followed by a consideration of specific factors that inhibit progress towards a professional standard of documentation, in particular the confusion created by bureaucratic rules and nursing’s innate resistance to documentation. It concludes by voicing the call for a better way to meet both bureaucratic and professional requirements.

Topics:

• Rules And Regulations
• Professional/Bureaucratic Tensions
• Barriers To Documenting Gerontological Nursing Care
  • Nursing’s Cultural Resistance To Documentation
  • Nursing Care Of The Aged As Unremarkable
• Is There A Better Way?
• In Summary
• References

Speaker/ Author:

Pauline Savy RN, RPN, B Admin (Nurs), Grad Dip Ger, FRCNA
Pauline has had a lengthy professional involvement in aged care. As a registered nurse (Div 1) she has held clinical, educational and administrative positions within extended care and psychiatric facilities. She has worked as a nurse consultant in gerontology, specialising in the development of education programs for residential and community caregivers. Currently she is employed at La Trobe University’s Albury- Wodonga campus where she lectures in the Graduate Diploma of Gerontology course. Pauline’s research interests include the use of qualitative methods, ethnography and the experience of health and illness in old age.

A long-standing interest in the experience of dementia and the outcomes of care prompted her to undertake a Master’s degree (by research) at La Trobe University. This ethnographic study explores the caregiving environment and its impact on the personhood of dementia sufferers in long-term residential care facilities, as well as how caregivers understand their work.

Professional Reviews:

This chapter is a good resource for hightlighting the improtance of documentation however, it is now out of date with ACFI (Aged Care Funding Instrument)the documentation tool now in place.

This chapter explain the important of documentation in age care and what it meant to the patient care when we record the information for their care. The out come will be better communication between health professional and that will improving their care.