Gretchel Gealogo, Ph.D., RN, remembers the moment when\u00a0her dissertation topic was born\u2014during a night shift on a hospital medical-surgical floor.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had a patient with a fractured arm who also had Alzheimer\u2019s\u00a0disease,\u201d said Dr. Gealogo, a 2015 graduate of the Ph.D. program at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. \u201cSe had been agitated all day, but she couldn\u2019t really verbalize that she was in pain.\u201d\u00a0 Dr. Gealogo put a few clues together\u2014notes from the previous\u00a0shift, drawn curtains in the room, and the patient\u2019s increased agitation\u2014and tried a different approach. \u201cI asked her, \u2018Are you uncomfortable?\u2019 and she said, \u2018Yes, I\u2019m really uncomfortable.\u2019\u2009\u201d Dr. Gealogo was able to treat the patient\u2019s pain and help her sleep through the night.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe next morning, she said to me, with tears in her eyes, \u2018I know that I\u2019m losing it.\u2019 I cried all the way home,\u201d said Dr. Gealogo. \u201cIt was a big \u2018aha\u2019 moment for me. I wanted to study more about how patients tell us they\u2019re in pain and what we\u2019re supposed to be paying attention to.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr. Gealogo\u2019s dissertation, \u201cA Light in the Dark: Development\u00a0of a Conceptual Model for Person-Engaged Dementia Care,\u201d proposes a care model based on the premise that dementia patients\u00a0are health care consumers who should contribute to their health care decisions\u2014and that the role of health care providers is to help them.<\/p>\n
To develop her model, Dr. Gealogo spent four months gathering data at a successful community-based adult day center. She rode the bus in the mornings, participated in activities, and interviewed patients, families and staff. The center was popular with participants because it employed an innovative model called parallel programming, in which patients of different cognitive ability levels are engaged together instead of being separated.
\n\u201cTake a bingo game,\u201d she said. \u201cAt one table, you have folks who need a lot of assistance, so a staff member is there to help with their cards and chips. At another table, you have fully functioning participants, and they may even be helping out lower-functioning participants. But everybody\u2019s doing the same activity. It\u2019s inclusive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr. Gealogo, who now serves as a postdoctoral fellow\/research\u00a0coordinator at Seton Dell Medical School Stroke Institute, believes that person-engaged alternative models can be used in\u00a0many patient populations, and her job as a nurse is to help engage\u00a0patients in their care, no matter how difficult that may be.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the end of the day, there\u2019s a patient in that bed; a patient\u00a0with some capacity to contribute to his or her care or intervention.\u00a0We have a duty to help them do that,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Alumna Gretchel Gealogo, Ph.D., M.S.N., RN, gathered data from dementia patients with the goal of improving the quality of care by health care providers and the patients’ ability to contribute to their health care decisions. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,11],"magazine":[24],"issue-year":[20],"featured-story":[],"class_list":["post-479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academics","category-patient-care","magazine-tribute","issue-year-20"],"yoast_head":"\n