Nurses who cure for elderly people arc likely to encounter situations in which they arc forced to act in the patient’s best interests, but when do those actions violate a patient’s legal rights? Bridgit Dimond offers her legal knowledge in this abridged extract from her book, Legal Aspects of Nursing

It is a truism that every elderly person is different. The fact that a person is over 60 or 70 or 80 or 90 says absolutely nothing else about them. Standards of health, loneliness, housing, finance, mobility and capability are as varied as with any other age group. All that can be said of them as a group is that it is more likely than not that they will be faced with some problems: social, economic, health or others and that these are more likely to be multiple problems, interrelated, with one triggering oft another.. It is equally true that... there are no basic principles of law purely for geriatric patients... the general principles of negligence and vicarious liability apply equally to the nurse who cares for elderly people. However, there are particular difficulties w'hich the... nurse is... likely to encounter... and it is to these that we now turn. In this section particular attention will be paid to...: