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Jenna M. Moening

ENG 1201.507

Professor Joyce Barnes

20 January 2019

Over Medicating The Elderly

I chose to research more into the topic of how the elderly are being harmed by over

medication. The motivation behind choosing this topic for my research is because I work as a

certified nursing assistant with specialized Alzheimer’s/Dementia residents in a long term care

facility and have come to see different views on this topic. I also had a grandfather who was

affected by Alzheimer’s and ended up being placed into a care facility and I noticed how they

would medicate my grandfather. While at work recently, I saw how a coworker of mine became

very frustrated with one of the residents who was getting anxious, frustrated, and slightly

combative and instead of calmly reassuring the resident and calming them down, they

immediately went to the nurse and said that the nurse needed to give the resident whatever

medication they could have to calm them down so that they would be tolerable to take care of.

Since the nurse really only goes off of what the aids notice and tell them, the nurse went and

gave the medication to the resident. Within thirty minutes to an hour, they calmed down so much

they could not respond without slurring their words or not at all making sense in response to the

questions being asked to them. To me, this really irritated and bothered me because the resident

could of easily been calmed down if spoken to the right way and taken to a different environment

to alleviate their anxiety. After witnessing this in my own employment, I thought that this would

be the perfect topic to research to learn more about and possibly even educate some of my
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coworkers at work about the harmful effects that over medication has on the elderly patients that

we take care of.

Personally, I feel that this topic is very conflicting for me. A large part of me feels that

over medication is doing more harm than good to the elderly just based off of my own

observations while at work, but the other part of me also can see how sometimes it is very

necessary if the elderly patient is getting too out of hand and cannot be calmed down after

multiple attempts. I think that this is a very big question within the healthcare field because there

are so many different views about it between individuals whether they are a member in the

healthcare system or a family member watching their relative change as a result of over

medication. I definitely lean more to the part of me that thinks that the elderly do get harmed

because they turn almost zombie-like and I don’t believe anyone would want to sit and feel like

that. I know that over medication can happen with any elderly individual even without being in a

facility. I know that over medication can be accidental as well as on purpose and I also know that

over medication can cause multiple adverse drug reactions in the body that may lead to other

serious health problems if taken along with other medications or too much.

With this topic, I am hoping to learn what exactly over medication does to the elderly

body and how it affects their quality of life. I think that I will start finding the answers to my

questions from scholarly journals and health articles. One question that I have during this

research is what I could do, as a healthcare professional, to avoid over medicating an elderly

resident. Another question that I would like answered during my research is how does over

medication of the elderly affect their family visitations and if the family members even notice if

their relative is being over medicated.