Finding the Truth

Hi all
My post is to do with communication. I am currently on a gerontology placement and it is required that a comprehensive geriatric assessment be performed on every patient on admission to the ward, with emphasis on what is functionally required to enable the patient to return home. I was assessing a lady who was very resentful at being placed into a geriatric ward as she was only quite young at 69 years of age - although the admission critieria require the patient to be <65 years old the majority of patients are over about 85 years old. She was very anxious to return home quickly and during the assessment was giving the impression that she was coping at home just fine without any assistance, that her son was doing everything for her and this was all going fine. She insisted that she was fine to go straight home from the ward as I believed that she felt that saying this this would get her home quickly. However, the next day when I was speaking to her I had some extra time so I was allowing her a lot of time to talk through her worries and concerns. During this she confided that she actually was having increasing difficulty coping at home, especially with personal care such as showering even with the help of a shower chair, however she was afraid that it would slow her discharge if she revealed this to anyone. I reassured her that it was more important that she be able to cope at home and that there were many services available. I then spoke to the OT who has since spoken to her about alternative equipment, and the social worker who is arranging for services to visit the lady at home when she returns to help her with self-care. From this I learnt that during a quick assessment you may only get so much from a patient, it is only when you can spend some time with them and really listen that you can find out the true story. Unfortunately due to time constraints this rarely gets to happen as there is usually so many patients to be seen, but in an ideal world it would be good to have the time to really listen to what the patient is feeling, and that I guess that the answers from the assessment need to be taken with a pinch of salt in case the patient is saying different things just so that they get the outcome that they want.