Home Nursing - Caring For Older People

When you hear about an older person or a sick person who needs home nursing, do not automatically decide that they're going into a nursing home. This term now refers to the kind of nursing one gets as a patient within the environment of one's own home.

There are nursing professionals who will come right to your door to deliver good care. In the beginning, there were public health nurses who used to come in as an extension of hospital care to check on their patients and do whatever was needed.

Now, with patients being discharged from the hospital even quicker than ever before, the need is even greater. And most people would rather get back to their own familiar territory as long as they'll be checked by competent professionals who know what they're doing with regard to treatments and medications. There are many nursing programs available.

And there are lots of academic nursing programs available that will help the student focus on the area of home nursing. So check around and find one of these programs that suits your needs so that, upon graduation, it can point you in the direction of a suitable home nursing agency that will send you out to the people in their homes who need you.

These people will need you, for instance, if they're getting old and infirm, if they have an injury or disability, or if they are chronically or terminally ill. You, and/or the agency that's sending you out, will have to know how to process third party payments such as through Medicaid and Medicare so that you get paid in a timely manner and the patient gets continuous care.

A home health nurse may or may not have extensive medical training, but he or she will have to be more knowledgeable than hospital nurses because they're the ones who have to be able to provide support and treatment under a variety of circumstances with no doctor or other nurse around to ask for advice. They'll also be their patients' educators and tell them the best ways to care for their conditions. They serve a multitude of helpful functions.

That's why such nurses have to have a basic nursing degree, it's true, but they also have to have other qualities that make them good home health nurses. They must be flexible enough to do their job in any setting that they're sent to. That means they have to be tolerant and have good communication skills. They're going into someone's home so they must be able to talk to patients and family members.

They're on the front lines of the changing medical field, and they'll be called on to be the mediators between their patients and the doctors and hospitals that will serve them or have served them.