COMPETENCY DEVELOPMENT IN EDUCATING HEALTH CARE SPECIALISTS AT WORK WITH OLDER PEOPLE

Health and social care specialists who work with older people and provide systematic direct and indirect professional care and support to people older than 65 and to their families, thus ensuring various care and support services in different environments including preventive, supportive, disease management, recuperative, paliative, short-term and long-term care, need specific competences in order to understand and ensure older people’s needs and care. Older people and especially frail older people can have problems that are interlinked, for instance, cognitive and functional limitations that are combined with psychosocial problems and social isolation. In order to develop students’ competence at work with older people- understanding and empathy, it is necessary to research these problems during the study process by integrating study courses that would ensure emphatic and reasonable attitude and action in clinical practice in the sphere of health and social welfare when taking care of older patients. Aim - To characterize acquisition process of professional competences of future health care specialists that are to be developed purposefully and applied when working with old people. Methodology – Analysis of study course descriptions in the study programme “Nursing”. Results - RSU study programme “Nursing” contains clearly defined descriptions of professional competences.