Presenter: Alejandro Venable-Croft, Bioengineering, Global Public Health Scholars
An increasing amount of the world’s population is aging and thus a higher percentage will be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease or Dementia. My practicum project is focused on how healthcare providers interact with patients with these disorders and their families. The goal is to interview workers at a nursing home/adult day care center that regularly interacts with these types of disorders to see what challenges they face in caring for these patients as well as observing what they can do. In addition, surveys will be given out to the families of these patients to gauge how much they know about the disease as well as what they worry about most when it comes to their loved one. The result will be a plan that is an amalgamation of this information that could theoretically be implemented to centers that care for AD/Dementia patients to increase quality of patient care and family education. The plan will also come with a feasibility assessment of implementation of the plan.