Failures in assessing elderly patients, INMO conference hears

Elderly people are not being properly assessed before hospital discharge and frequently end up in nursing homes that cannot meet their needs, and where patient mix is inappropriate, a conference has heard.

Delegates attending the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation’s (INMO) annual delegate conference in Cork unanimously carried a motion calling on the HSE to ensure multidisciplinary teams conduct thorough assessments.

Aideen Smith of the Galway branch described a nursing home where the youngest patient is 35 and the oldest 104. She witnessed a man with a brain injury “shouting at an older man with vascular dementia”. She said patients in nursing homes often had a range of disabilities, ranging from challenging behaviour as a result of brain injury, to mental health illness, to dementia, to multiple sclerosis.