Community Practice and Evaluation of Senior Citizens' Needs

Community Practice and Evaluation
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Community Practice and Evaluation
Introduction
Many elderly people have gone through potentially traumatic events which have had serious impacts on their mental health situation. An event which is potentially traumatic may not affect two people in a similar manner. As such, elderly people with abandonment traumatic experiences do not exhibit similar behaviors as they are all affected differently. The provision of mental health services for elderly people demands additional logistic considerations that may often involve nursing or skilled care facilities. It turns out that most senior citizens have been undergoing abandonment trauma and skilled care facilities are becoming a place of refuge for most of them (Rambaree, Powers & Smith, 2019). Such abandonment is deemed to be a form of abuse because a person who is expected to take responsibility of caring for the elderly individual deserts such responsibility. The abandoned senior citizens are left in great confusion and despair as they mostly have no resources to seek further assistance. In this paper, the aim is to identify and assess the needs of senior citizens in relation to abandonment trauma and to incorporate interventions that will give them the much needed resources.
Outcome Goals
Short-term goal
For this intervention, the most important short-term goal is to train drivers so that they can become more attentive to the medical needs of the residents. Behind the wheel of any car should be a trained driver who understands that he or she is transporting human beings. When it comes to the case of older people with trauma, the drivers in the community should have basic skills for handling such people. It is similar to the case of ambulance drivers who have to respond to emergency situations which often demand for exemptions from certain traffic regulations. Thus, for the case of senior citizens with abandonment trauma, drivers in their communities must be trained to specifically handle their needs.
Long-term Goal
The long-term goal for the intervention would be to provide remedial training or continuous training which will help in developing the skills of the drivers. The importance of having the remedial training is that it will reduce the feelings of inadequacy which the drivers could be having with regards to handling such elderly people. Continuous training also helps in boosting the motivation of those who may have lost their vigor in the process of handling elderly people with abandonment trauma. Remedial and continuous training of these drivers is also likely going to close the gap between what they know and what they are expected to know hence improving their overall competency.
Determining the goal choices
The choice for the short-term goal of training drivers was occasioned by the fact that drivers working at the facility have often faced challenges of responding to the needs of the senior citizens. For example, when a senior citizen needs to be taken to a mental health facility after being referred by a nurse at the center, drivers often lack the competence to handle them in the process of transporting them from the facility to the one to which they have been referred. As such, training of drivers on their roles and responsibilities with regards to these elderly people was deemed necessary.
While other staff members would have been chosen for this long-term goal, drivers were chosen because they played quite an important role in the well-being of the elderly people at the center. Therefore, when it comes to the long-term goal of continuous or remedial training of these drivers, this goal was settled on based on the fact that gaps have been witnessed on what the drivers know and what they should actually know. Thus, while drivers are human beings, they are prone to making mistakes. Others lose their motivation as time goes by. As such, remedial training and continuous training will help in perfecting the skills of these drivers with specific focus on their skills in managing the senior citizens and also on how their motivation for their job can be kept high.
Theoretical Support
The training of these drivers is backed up by community development concept such as symbolic interactionism. This theory is a micro-level concept which concentrates on how individual relate within a society (Denzin, 2017). Since drivers are the ones who ferry the senior citizens from one place to another, there is a form of relationship that is built between the two groups. As such, if drivers are provided with the relevant training, it will become easy for them to relate better with the senior citizens hence help them in their plight.
Furthermore, these goals can also be viewed from the empowerment perspective. In social work, empowerment entails the use of intervention techniques to guide people towards a particular achievement of sense of control. People might sometimes be helpless in their roles, but empowering them reduces such helplessness and adds to their experience (Skene, 2021). For these drivers, training them is a form of empowerment which gives them the skills needed to handle senior citizens with abandonment trauma. In the end, both the drivers and the senior citizens benefit from the empowerment program.
Process Goals
In order to achieve the goal of training of the drivers, several process goals will have to be engaged. The first process goal is that the drivers could be taught on avoiding over speeding while ferrying the elderly people. The second process goal is that the drivers could be the drivers are taken through the government’s regulations on reckless driving. The third process goal for achieving this outcome would be to take the drivers through a communications skills lesson which will sharpen their skills in how they talk and respond to the elderly.
1729905270400With regards to different activities representing engagement with community members, the drivers can be engaged in volunteering in the neighboring community to see if their training has been fruitful. Unless these drivers are tested with regards to what they have been taught, it will remain unknown whether the training has been successful or not. When it comes to collaborating with community groups, the drivers can be engaged in an exercise that will see them report at community group offices for assigned tasks. Such exercises will improve the cooperation between the trained drivers and community groups. With regard to advocacy activity, these drivers can be asked to...