Our panel chronic care nurses chats about nurses and chronic care givers on Nursing Notes Live this month. In this episode of the Nursing Notes Live podcast, I got the chance to sit down and chat with our panel of chronic care nurses including Cindy Richards, president of the American Nephrology Nurses’ Association and pediatric renal transplant coordinator at Children’s of Alabama in Birmingham, Ala. and Pam Cacchione, President of the Gerontological Advanced Practice Nurses Association (GAPNA); Endowed Term Chair in gerontological nursing; as well as an associate professor of geropsychiatric nursing at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Penn. Here’s that discussion.

—-

Subscribe to the MP3 Audio Podcast

 Facebook

—-

Jamie Davis:       Hi, Cindy and Pam, it’s great to have you both here on the show this morning and I’ll start off with my typical initial question for our panelists. Cindy, I’ll start with you. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about why you wanted to become a nurse?

Cindy Richards:   I was interested in nursing from the time I was a small child. I was one of those kids that grew up reading all about Clara Barton and Cherry Ames the book series that was written many years ago. It’s just something that always fascinated me. And I guess I’m just one of those people that likes to nurture. I’m driven to help other people. So that was why I went into nursing and I certainly had plenty of opportunity to do that over the last 35 years.

Jamie:                  Pam, how about you?

Pam Cacchione:  Well, I had surgery as a young child. I was probably three years old and ended up having surgery in my hands and interacted with nurses that positively impacted my care and negatively impacted my care. Even at that young age I had recollections of that and I wanted to be able to impact nursing in a positive way and to be able to provide care that speed up recovery as well as manage multiple chronic issues that needed to be addressed at the time of hospitalization.

Jamie:                   Excellent. Well, we’re going to talk about chronic care nursing and dealing with patients with chronic illnesses. It’s a subject that is near and dear to my heart. I have a daughter with rheumatoid arthritis. Yes, we helped her throughout her life to manage an illness with chronic issues. I’m curious – we’ll start with you, Pam – I know you have experiences with mostly older adults and people may think of older adults as people that are most commonly having chronic illness but what is it that makes it different caring for the chronically-ill patient when compared to that patient with an acute-onset illness?

Pam:                     So chronic conditions have to be managed over time and need to become a part of the person’s daily routine. With older adults, in particular, the complexity has increased dramatically based on the aging process. It really is a challenge but can be addressed by managing the whole person. One of the things that I think is really critical is setting goals with individuals to help them identify things that they want to reach or accomplishments that they want to achieve so that you can get their buy-in to manage their chronic conditions over time so that they will be able to reach the goals that they would like to reach.

Jamie:                   Cindy, do you have any thoughts to add to that?

Cindy:                   Absolutely. I completely agree with Pam. Working with chronic patients regardless of their age group is a lifelong thing. It’s something that occurs over months and many years.