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Summary: Living With Long Term Conditions

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Living with Long Term Conditions can be extremely challenging; coping with the stigmas surrounding LTCs, and enduring the pain, poor nutrition and depression that can occur simultaneously. Nutrition is one of the most fundamental needs of any individual, and the ability to maintain a proper diet is easily overlooked by health professionals. Pain, if not managed accordingly, can make a patient's life uncomfortable. These factors contribute to depression which worsens the condition of the patient; they may be managing their health but over-looking their well-being (Randall & Ford 2011). The approach to manage a LTC has to include the biological, psychological and sociological impact of the condition on the individual, which is known as the biopsychosocial …show more content…

Nurses must act as educators to help their patients regain their independence by investigating all aspects of their lives in order to provide an in-depth and fully encompassing care plan. However, education alone is not enough, patients have to be encouraged to change and accept the adaptations to their behaviours that negatively affect their rehabilitation in order for the care plan to be successful; it is not always a case of just taking the correct medication, lifestyle changes must also occur. According to Furze et al. (2008) Cognitive Behaviour therapy is one of the most successful ways of assisting an individual to change their behaviours and outlook. This type of treatment involves pinpointing certain aspects of an individual's lifestyle and behaviours that are causing detrimental effects to the individual's health; this allows the individual to replace them with positive and adaptive behaviours, thoughts and feelings in order to assist them to cope. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommended this therapy for the management of depression and anxiety as well, which as was mentioned before, can be the result of living with an LTC such as Chronic Heart Failure (Robertson

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