Hnc Social Care
I am an Hnc SocialCare Student currently on placement within a day care center for older adults. I have experienced an incident in which challenging behavior was an issue. The following essay will detail this incident.
I had been with my current day care center for roughly a year. The center cared for older adults primarily with conditions including dimentia and alzheimer's disease. I was called into my supervisor's office and notified that we were taking on a new patient. The patient was in their 40's and had down syndrome. Our center was offering respite nighttime care. This was to be my first time caring for a down syndrome patient, so I was unsure what to expect.
The patient arrived for care the next evening. We were offering the family overnight relief care. Apparently the young man does not sleep well and often wakes up during the night interrupting his now elderly parent's sleep. So the parents introduced me to their son and explained his likes and dislikes. They also told me that this would be his first time in a night time daycare setting. It was this news that made me slightly apprehensive of watching the man, as most patients have trouble adjusting to new settings. However, I assumed that he would be cooperative given that his condition was a learning disability not a memory issue.
I proceeded to take the man to his room to show him where everything was. He had not eaten dinner yet, so I walked him down to the cafeteria where he ate dinner. He was still hungry and asked for dessert, but I explained that it was late and the cafeteria was closing. He pouted a little and then decided to move on. This behavior seemed interesting to me, as I had never experienced a patient that had such a reaction. After that we went...
Immediately, he began refusing to cooperate. He threw a tantrum stomping his feet and saying he was not tired. I explained that it was late and that his parents wanted him to get some rest, but he refused claiming he was scared and that he did not want to sleep alone. This was when the real behavior issues started.
I tried to persuade him to climb into bed but he approached the bed and threw the covers onto the floor instead. At this point he was stomping and shouting as loud as could that he wanted his mother and did not want to be here. I tried to explain that he was only here for the night, but his behavior was getting more and more violent. I finally called for assistance to help calm him down. The assistance staff took him out of the room and held him in a chair so that we could talk. Realizing that he was not going to get his way, the man started cooperating and agreed to lay in bed and go to sleep. We escorted him back to his room after he was laying in bed I left the room and went to my station to write up the report for why I needed to call for assistance.
After an hour I heard some noise coming from his room, so I went in to check on him. Instead of sleeping, he had spent the entire hour tearing pictures out of magazines and spreading them around the room. When I asked him what he was doing, he explained the room was too empty and he need to decorate it. I reminded him that it was nighttime and he needed to go to sleep at which point he began throwing another tantrum and shouting for his mother. This time he became so excited that he wet himself. I called for assistance and we calmed him down again and located a pair of pajamas for him to change into. I once again told him to lay down…
