Case Assignment: Research Paper
Case Assignment: Research Paper
The goal of this assignment is for you to synthesize and apply what you learned in class into a well-written research paper. You will conduct research and write a paper with three parts for this assignment:
Part I: Examine your diet
Part II: Assess how the patient’s diet influences:
The individual’s health (anatomy)
The illness’s progression (pathophysiology)
Medications commonly used to treat the disease
Part Three: Create SMART goals for patients and an evidence-based plan of care (patient education)
Begin by looking over the patient profiles and assignment details in the Worksheets, Forms, and Templates section on the left. Choose one patient profile to use for Parts I-III of the assignment.
In addition to meeting the requirements of the assignment, your paper should:
It should be 4-5 pages long, not including the title and reference pages.
The source(s) should be included in the paragraphs. Use in-text citations to support your ideas by pointing to evidence in the literature.
Include at least two peer-reviewed sources in your paper.
To style your paper and cite your sources, use current APA format. For the section on calculations, use the sample paper’s list structure. A sample paper is available for download in the Worksheets, Forms, and Templates section on the left.
Include a title page as well as a reference page with a list of the sources you used. Allow enough time for proofreading and editing.
Dementia Treatment and Management: The Decisive Role of Primary Care Physician Practice
Dementia is a life-threatening condition typically characterized by dysfunction in intellectual domains of human existence including language, cognition, memory, and visuospatial ability. On average, 10 percent of adults aged 65 and above are suffering from dementia. Interestingly, 50 percent of elderly persons aged 90 and above are believed to have acquired this syndrome. Recent studies add that this condition poses catastrophic challenges to primary care physicians (PCPs) in the modern healthcare sector (American Diabetes Association, 2017). As the larger portion of the global population, particularly in the Asian and Western hemispheres, continue to age at unprecedented rates, the number of people suffering from dementia is bound to increase. At the moment, the global tally of demented patients lies at 24 million, and it is expected to increase to 52 and 81 million by 2030 and 2040 respectively. Such an alarming trend has been affirmed by the World Health Organization’s sentiments on Alzheimer’s, a condition rightly categorized under dementia. According to this body, Alzheimer’s is highly likely to become the leading factor behind disability among the elderly. In the United States alone, the population affected by this phenomenon has reached at least 5.3 million, and it is projected to triple within 50 years.
Apart from the noteworthy risk of deaths, the high prevalence rates have a substantial impact on the economic burden on both the patients’ families and the nations at large. In a recent clinical survey, Judge, et al. (2019) found that dementia costed between 100 and 150 billion dollars on an annual basis. As devastating as it sounds, this figure is on a steady increase due to the number of elderly people in the country. A somewhat similar trend has been witnessed in Europe, Wolters and colleagues (2020) argue that the region spends approximately 104 billion dollars in national care interventions. Such initiatives are necessary considering the fact that some dementia patients experience cognitive challenges that can be reversed through early diagnosis and therapeutic solutions. In attempt to promote efficacy in the resolution of such cases, clinical practitioners are urged to reflect on the role of the primary care physicians. Judge, et al. (2019) define PCPs as the bridge between patients and the healthcare system. They are the professional care providers that equip primary care providers (mainly patients’ families/guardians) with essential information and skills for the management of their patient in unmonitored settings such as homes.
On this note, this paper proposes a research project that investigates the decisive role of primary care physicians on the recovery process of patients suffering from dementia. For the sake of clarity, discussion on these practitioners will be tethered around their approaches to office-based encounters among all stakeholders including the patients, family care, diagnosis, management, emotional support, and service linkage. This project will enhance both the researcher’s and the audience’s grasp of this matter while responding to the question below:
Do care provider practice partners have positive impacts on the treatment and management of dementia among elderly patients?
Problem Statement
Primary care treatment standards for dementia patients mandate practitioners to ameliorate cognitive and non-cognitive symptoms while maintaining the patient’s quality of life. As a rule, this process is highly dependent on the practitioner’s capacity to support and educate the patient and/or his family on key disease management factors including emotional stability and physical safety. Judge et al. (2019) add that commendable care necessitates connections between patients, families, referral medical specialists, and social/communal services. Unfortunately, the patients’ cognitive decline triggers behavioral disturbances that result in increased disability and caregiver burnout, burden, and eventually, anxiety/depression. These challenges are magnified by high clinical costs due to early institutionalization. These issues include increased reliance on the patients’ families, role shifting from curing to caring, behavioral and biological complexity of the condition, and insufficient knowledge and resources necessary for treatment.
Dementia is a largely misunderstood phenomenon. Such a bold claim is deeply embedded on common industry trends including the lack of concise diagnostic tools and the complex interactions between the primary care physicians and the patients as well as their families. In the wake of such a realization, practitioners should have a lucid understanding of how their practice impacts the outcomes of care despite the systemic inefficiencies. They should know how to leverage resources and skills at their disposal to improve the type of care delivered to dementia patients. As highlighted earlier, physicians’ roles in dementia treatment are usually heightened during their interaction with patients, their families, and the healthcare system (American Diabetes Association, 2017). This implies that they should foster clarity throughout the diagnosis, treatment, and management phases. Fundamentally, this process must involve the provision of emotional support and service linkage. By now, it is obvious that physician care practice is at the backbone of dementia treatment and management. Therefore, these practitioners should know how to capitalize on what they have to achieve what they have not. A qualitative exploration of physician sentiments on this matter will go a long way in affirming the preceding hypothesis.
References
American Diabetes Association. (2017). Standards of medical care in diabetes—2017 abridged for primary care providers. Clinical diabetes: a publication of the American Diabetes Association, 35(1), 5.
Judge, D., Roberts, J., Khandker, R. K., Ambegaonkar, B., & Black, C. M. (2019). Physician Practice Patterns Associated with Diagnostic Evaluation of Patients with Suspected Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer’s Disease. International Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, 2019.
Wolters, F. J., Chibnik, L. B., Waziry, R., Anderson, R., Berr, C., Beiser, A. S., & Dartigues, J. F. (2020). 27-year time trends in dementia incidence in Europe and the US: the Alzheimer Cohorts Consortium. Neurology.
You should proofread your paper. However, do not rely solely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part, and your grade will suffer as a result. Papers with a high number of misspelled words and grammatical errors will be penalized. Before submitting your paper, go over it in silence and then aloud, and make any necessary changes. It is often beneficial to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Uncorrected mistakes are preferable to handwritten corrections.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point typeface (10 to 12 characters per inch). Smaller or compressed type, as well as papers with narrow margins or single spacing, are difficult to read. It is preferable to allow your essay to exceed the recommended number of pages rather than attempting to compress it into fewer pages.
Large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are also unacceptable, waste trees, and will not fool your professor.
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced, and have a one-inch margin on all four sides of each page. When submitting hard copies, use white paper and print with dark ink. It will be difficult to follow your argument if it is difficult to read your essay.