The article “Psychological factors for influencing healthy aging in adults in Korea” by KyungHun Han et al (2015) talks about the psychological factors that influence healthy aging in the society. The authors in this article have noted that healthy aging includes physical, social, as well as spiritual wellbeing and that each of these factors plays an important role in determining an individual’s health in old age. The manner in which each person lives their life at one stage depends how well they live their life at the later stage of life.
This implies that the quality of life at old age is highly influenced by how well one lives their life during the adult stage of life. This article points out that self-esteem, depression, ego-integrity, self-achievement and loneliness. For this reason, it is important to access how these factors affect the individual before coming up with a solution to help them (Han, et al. , 2015).
The aging process is complex and understanding it calls for an examination of the social influence for the affected person.In most cases, the way in which the individual views hemselves has a big impact on how they perceive themselves and as such it is important to help the aged person to develop self-esteem in order to help them fit into the society. Such an examination calls for the clinician to help the aged person to reconnect with the things that were important to the aged person at the earlier stage of life. Due to the understanding that one stage of life affects the next stage, it is important to put in place measures that help the individual to take control of one stage of life as that would have an effect on their later stage of life (Han, et l.
2015).In this article titled “Assessment and management of chronic pain in the older person living in the community,” Anne Dewar talks about how the clinician can help in the assessment and management of pain in aged people. Chronic pain is identified as a pervasive and intricate challenge that is hard to treat appropriately. There are many challenges that nurses working in home/community settings face when it comes to the management of pain (Dewar, 2006).
The author in this article notes that the belief that an individual has regarding the anagement of pain is critical in determining how that individual manages pain.This has led to the conclusion that pain is what the patient says it is. This means that the clinician should not use their own interpretation since the patient often has ways in which they want their pain to be managed and any other attempt to assess the pain differently is often met with resistance (Dewar, 2006). There is also evidence that most clinicians tend to underestimate the existence of pain in aged individuals.
This has led to a scenario where most aged people end up suffering in pain for ack of effective evaluation methods.The major reason for this is the lack of knowledge on how to effectively manage pain. In most cases, nurses tend to underestimate pain among aged people that are single as compared to those that have spouses. The major reason for this is because spouses might alert the nurses on the existence of pain as opposed to the single person who might not clearly communicate what they are feeling.
For this reason, the nurse should develop tools that help in the assessment and management of pain in aged people since at the present there is an adequate tool that does this (Dewar, 2006).
