The care of the elderly from the undergraduate student in nursing education

Abstract

Introduction. Life expectancy increases diseases related with age and because of that, there is the necessity to have a caregiver in charge of elderly people more when this one is not functional anymore. The caregiver has the risk to suffer stress or fatigue if this doesn’t have economic, psychological or physical support to cope with the process. Based on an informal survey, Nursing students found that there are a large number of elder people caregivers. As part of this, the nursing students, implemented a program where students took care elderly people without charge, with the objective to provide safe multidisciplinary quality attention and in the meantime, caregivers could have time for themselves. After two announcements without any answer and after logistic settings, a 3th announcement was successful. Twenty-eight elderly people where attended during four hours by three Saturdays. Caregivers loved the project and they participated in an enthusiastic way. Because of this, it is possible to see the possibility of the implementation of programs like this one. The recommendations are to integrate a formal proposal, to have more diffusion of the project, to increase the number of sessions and to have a multidisciplinary team...