Betül Çakmak, Merve Nur Öz
Lokman Hekim Health Sciences - 2025;5(3):242-248
With advancing age, the likelihood of multimorbidity increases, leading to increased dependency and functional impairment becoming more prominent issues among the elderly. Thus, it is important to identify the physiological changes and disease symptoms that occur in older people due to other factors and to assess older people as a whole. However, the complexity of existing health problems, the challenges of diagnostic processes, and the inclination of older people to deliberately hide or deny their health problems make the work of health professionals difficult. Healthcare professionals must possess adequate, up-to-date, and comprehensive knowledge to effectively treat and care for older adults. As a new and constantly evolving field, gerontological nursing plays a critical role in geriatric health care. As constituting the members of the geriatric health care team, gerontological nurses are responsible for monitoring the independence of older persons, maintaining planned treatments, planning, implementing, and evaluating the outcomes of an individualized, multidimensional nursing care process. They assess the elderly through interviews, history taking, observation, and detailed assessments based on gerontological dimensions to determine care needs and provide appropriate nursing interventions. The literature indicates that only a small number of nurses choose to specialize in gerontology and that nurse educators play a significant role in guiding nurses' career choices. The main reasons for this include a lack of awareness of the field of gerontology, deficiencies in postgraduate educational programs, a shortage of faculty, and inadequate levels of knowledge among nurses about caring for older adults. Therefore, it is emphasized that the gerontological nursing workforce should be strengthened and that the number and scope of the relevant educational programs that aim at enhancing the competencies of nurses should be enhanced. The line of studies assessing the impact of gerontological knowledge levels suggest that the nurses with higher knowledge contribute significantly to improving the well-being of older adults. That said, research on gerontological nursing is currently insufficient and no studies have been found in Türkiye in this regard. Therefore, this study was conducted to assess the gerontological competence of nurses working in a district state hospital with 300 beds in Türkiye and to identify the factors influencing it. The aim of the study is to assess the gerontological competence of nurses working in a hospital in Türkiye and to identify the factors influencing it.
