The Nursing Goals Assignment Report

Nursing
Student’s name:
Institutional:

Older adult interview for Module 2 Mrs JK
The interview was performed on Mrs JK, an 80-year-old woman currently living alone. She lives
in a certain village approximately 5 kilometres from the hospital. She is a widow, and her
husband passed away six years ago. She is a mother of 3 daughters; all of them are married and
away from home. They come to check on her once or twice a year or whenever a problem arises.
She completed university education and was working as a nurse before she retired 20 years ago.
She had worked since the age of 25, and her husband was military personnel. She provided cook
care to her children and educated them well. She is now living on her pension, which is now not
enough considering her current illness. She is currently being managed on congestive cardiac
failure for the past two years. With this condition, it is becoming more difficult for her to
perform activities such as cooking, cleaning as she reports to getting tired easily and feeling
breathless whenever she does a slightly heavy job. She reports to be feeling lonely most of the
time and prefers to sleep most of the time and even eating has become a problem. She has lost
approximately 5 Kgs within the last two months.
Mrs JK even though she is having lonely times now, she reports having had some joyful and
enjoyable moments, especially when her husband was alive. She reports being the greatest
moments she has ever had. Her husband was a loving and understanding man as she reports.
They also lived happily with their children before they left home. She also loved her job as a
nurse so much. She reports having been her passion for helping sick people to recovery. She
even used to take care of older people in nursing homes as a way of charity whenever she had
free time. The good moments ended when she lost her husband. Moreover, with the children
leaving home also made it harder.

Although the client had the hardest time after losing her husband, she had overcome other
hardships before, and she was able to handle them well. She lost both her parents at a younger
age in a car accident. She was taken care of by her grandmother, who was treating her nicely,
and after attending a few therapy moments, she was able to accept it, and she can even talk about
the situation freely. She also lost her first job when she was pregnant with her first child and her
husband was out for war, but she survived it and looked for another job which was harder at that
moment, but she finally got one. Her main personal strengths are that she has a helping heart, and
this has helped her to have many friends around her. Therefore she does not have grudges with
people. She also forgives and moves on that has given her more strength.
The client was helped to identify health and non-healthy coping mechanisms. In healthy coping,
the problem causing the stress or conflict is solved or eliminated such that the stress is eliminated
completely. This is called adaptive behavioural coping strategies or problem-focused. In a non-
healthy coping, the client tries to ignore the stressor or denies the conflict or the stressor, but the
problem is not solved. This is called appraisal-focused coping strategy. It can also be achieved
by altering one's goals and values. The client pushes the problem to the subconscious mind, but it
is not solved, so the problem resurfaces at some point in time. One can also use the emotion-
focused strategy where someone releases emotions, distract oneself, mediate or manages hostile
feelings (Matuschinski and Hammers, 2019).
Mrs JK has used the adaptive behavioural coping strategy most of the time. She reports that
whenever someone wrongs her, she does not like keeping grudges; therefore, she makes a
discussion with that person and solves the problem, in that was the stress level is reduced. Also,
whenever she feels stressed about anything, she always tries to find out what might have caused