Engaging Families as Care Partners in Community Nursing Homes
The project’s overall goal is to improve healthcare through family engagement to community nursing homes (NHs), a setting in which family engagement could have crucial positive impact. We aim to achieve this goal by collaborating with stakeholders from community NHs in Wisconsin to form a sustainable network to identify, synthesize, share, and implement effective strategies to engage families in NH resident care. Innovative family engagement strategies are directed by the priorities, needs, and interests of the residents and families the community NH network serves. In NHs specifically, family engagement has been associated with positive outcomes such as fewer infections, falls, unnecessary medications, and transfers for emergency care.
Outcomes
1) Development of a sustainable Wisconsin community nursing home network to support enhancements in resident care; 2) Synthesis of existing, successful approaches to engaging families of nursing home residents as care partners; 3) Development of a free, publicly available toolkit to support nursing home quality improvement efforts with a focus on engaging families