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For any of the following reports, please contact Debi Hoskinson at dhoskinson@nyahsa.org or (tel) 518-449-7873 ext. 143.

Final Report for “Caring Communications: Partners in Caregiving”

This project built upon two other completed FLTC projects, one on improving staff-family relationships in nursing homes and the other on care at the end of life in nursing homes. Both projects had findings underscoring the importance and value of staff-family communication. The real catalyst and inspiration for this project was the finding from the end-of-life project that staff and families had different goals and priorities about end-of-life care: Staff considered communication with families as having a far lower priority than did family members. Overall goals included: enriched care of the elderly by staff and family members, increased family member satisfaction and participation in care, decreased family frustration, and better communication among elders, staff and family members. The approach to achieving this goal was a training program for staff and families to enhance communication around end-of-life issues.

Final Report for “Culturally Competent Long Term Care”

Summary: Two demographic imperatives drove this project. First, from 1994 to 2050, there was a predicted 100 percent rise in the number of elderly who were a race other than white (U.S. Census Bureau, 1995). In New York state, the number of black, non-Hispanic elderly would purportedly increase by 60 percent from 1995 to 2015; the number of Hispanic elderly would increase by 203 percent; the number of Asian/Pacific elderly would increase by 306 percent; and the number of the Native American elderly would increase by 98 percent (Sutton, 1999). Second, elder care staff was diverse as well. Wilner and Schenkman (1993) found that CNAs in 32 nursing homes in eastern Massachusetts spoke 24 different languages. In addition, continuing care providers were increasingly recruiting immigrants as nurses and CNAs (Heim and Tucker, 2000). The overall project goal of “Culturally Competent Long Term Care” was to create long-term care environments that were able to respond fully to the challenges and opportunities of caring for frail elders and their families who were racially, culturally and ethnically diverse.

Final Report for the Robert Wood Johnson study “End-of-Life Care in Nursing Homes: Provider and Family Perspectives and Strategies to Enhance Care”

Summary: The FLTC conducted a study involving 486 nursing home staff members from 140 facilities and 188 family members of dying residents. The purpose of this project was to:
· learn how nursing home staff perceived the quality of end-of-life care provided by their facility;
· learn how family members of recently deceased residents perceived the quality of end-of-life care;
· identify what elements affected these perceptions in order to make recommendations for practice, policy, and regulatory improvement in end-of-life care; and
· develop case-studies (which will be discussed during the session) to illustrate problems and successes in end-of-life care.

In this particular self-selected sample, we found very positive assessments of end-of-life care by both staff and family respondents, with more that 95 percent of all respondents rating the care as satisfactory or better. Interestingly, staff and family had different conceptualizations of what was good care at the end-of-life. Communication was far more important to family members than to staff.

For the following publication, please contact the publisher.

Elder Care and Service Learning: A Handbook

This hard cover college textbook is the first of its kind to include basic information on aging, policy overviews of aging, and information about the service learning in elder care experience in one convenient volume.

Chapter headings are: What is service learning; Basic Information on Aging; The Service Learning Class; Communication Skills; Doing Service Learning with the Elderly; Elder Care Issues and Policy; and Case Studies of Service Learning Classes.

Contacts for ordering are: Greenwood Press, Westport, CT; phone 203-226-3571; fax 203-222-1502. http://www.greenwood.com/catalog/T305.aspx. ISBN: 0-86569-305-6.