The future of advanced practice registered nurses is in their ability to fill the gaps in health care delivery. A major gap is in the shortage of primary care providers. This shortage has partially been created by the rising number of individuals over 65 years of age due to the aging of the 'Baby Boomer' generation. In the next two decades the number of adults over 65 will increase by 45% and the number of people over 100 will be seven times higher (Centre for Diet and Activity Research, 2013). The impact of this phenomenon is felt throughout the medical field. Meanwhile the time spent in chronic illness for these individuals is also rising. Considering this, the time to examine healthy aging is now. Getting elderly patients on board …show more content…
Therefore, well-being is not dependent on illnesses, stresses, or events; but rather, how a person responds to these. A person can be considered successfully healthy if they perceive themselves to have well-being. Accepting the experiences that occur as one ages and considering them as an opportunity to grow and gain knowledge of oneself defines well-being in a person. This allows an individual to discover a meaningful purpose for their life. “Loneliness in Older Persons: A Predictor of Functional Decline and Death” is an article that supports the need for a change. The article details a study that measured people's loneliness by asking three questions and then followed them for six years assessing decline and recording deaths. 43% of the subjects were categorized as lonely. Those subjects did far worse in all four of the measurable areas for decline and there were far many more deaths over the six years for those in the lonely category (Perissinotto, Stijacic, Cenzer, & Covinsky, …show more content…
The age of the population matched on everything I found because it was in my inclusion criteria. My population also stated adults with varied health statuses so I looked at whether the report included subjects with different health statuses. I looked at the type of interventions used in the reports to try to find creative approaches to the problem. The intervention in each relevant report had to cover a time frame of at least one year. Lastly, the report had to examine a participant's sense of well-being, not only quantifiable