A staff development plan for the graying of America's hospital patients.

In this article, the authors describe a program created by a nursing inservice department to address the graying of America's hospital patients. The increased number of aging patients presents a challenge that hospitals must confront. Elderly patients who take longer to get well and consume more resources make unprecedented demands on nursing staff members. Because basic nursing education programs fail to address the problem, the task of preparing nursing personnel to care for aging patients falls to the hospital's department of staff development.