ATI RN
Age Specific Care Competency Questions
Question 1 of 4
A nurse assesses an elderly patient. The nurse should complete the Geriatric Depression Scale if the patient answers which question affirmatively.
Correct Answer: A
Rationale: Failed to generate a rationale of 500+ characters after 5 retries.
Question 2 of 4
Which remarks by a 72-year-old patient should prompt the nurse to assess for depression? Select one tha does not apply.
Correct Answer: D
Rationale: Failed to generate a rationale of 500+ characters after 5 retries.
Question 3 of 4
A patient diagnosed with a serious mental illness died suddenly at age 52. The patient lived in the community for 5 years without relapse and held supported employment the past 6 months. The distressed family asks, 'How could this happen?' Which response by the nurse accurately reflects research and addresses the family's question?
Correct Answer: B
Rationale: The family is in distress. Because they do not understand his death, they are less able to accept it and seek specific information to help them understand what happened. Persons with serious mental illness die an average of 25 years prematurely. Contributing factors include failing to provide for their own health needs (e.g forgetting to take medicine), inability to access or pay for care, higher rates of smoking, poor diet, criminal victimization, and stigma. The most accurate answer indicates that seriously mentally ill people are at much higher risk of premature death for a variety of reasons. Staff would not have been surprised that the patient died prematurely, and they would not attribute his death to random, undetected medical problems. Although the cause of death will not be reliably established until the autopsy, this response fails to address the familys need for information.
Question 4 of 4
The nurse manager of a mental health center wants to improve medication adherence among the seriously mentally ill persons treated there. Which interventions are likely to help achieve this goal? Select one tha does not apply
Correct Answer: A
Rationale: Trust in ones providers is a key factor in treatment adherence, and mentally ill persons can sometimes take a very long time to develop such trust; therefore, interventions which stabilize staffing allow patients to have more time with staff to develop these bonds. Ready access to prescribers allows medicine-related concerns to be addressed quickly, reducing obstacles to adherence such as side effects or ineffective dosages. Medication costs can be obstacles to adherence as well. Many SMI patients have anosognosia and do not adhere to treatment because they believe they are not ill, so telling them nonadherence will worsen an illness they do not believe they have is unlikely to be helpful. Increasing medication education is helpful only when the cause of nonadherence is a knowledge deficit. Other issues that reduce adherence, particularly anosognosia and side effects, are seldom helped by longer medication education. Requiring medication adherence to participate in other programs is coercive and unethical. Smaller, more frequent doses do not reduce side effects and make the regimen more difficult for the patient to remember.