For my Long Term Care site evaluations, each meeting we were to present an H&P. What was different about these write ups was that there was additional focus on our patients’ living situations, as well as functional abilities. It was necessary to specify the patient’s place of residence, whether it was an apartment building or house; and to mention how many flights of stairs may be involved. If the patient is able to ambulate with or without assistive devices, or unable to ambulate in general, it should have been mentioned. Additionally, the types of ADLs and IADLs the patient could do was important to describe, since it gives providers and care-takers an idea of what the patient may need assistance with. The presence of family, friends, or health aide support should have also been identified. In general, all this additional note taking is meant to see how independent patients may be in their living situations. I appreciated practicing this type of note taking, since it can also be applicable to other patients who may be living with disabilities as well.

In the second meeting, I was also to present a journal article. My journal article’s objective was to see if aspirin-use in the healthy geriatric population was beneficial to a “disability-free survival”. It concluded that the aspirin group did not have a significant difference in “disability-free survival” compared with the placebo group. There was also no significant cardiovascular effect in the aspirin group, but found a higher bleeding risk.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.