Leslie A. Grant

Staff training and turnover in Alzheimer special care units: comparisons with non-special care units.

Nursing facility staff may not be properly trained to deal with behavioral symptoms of Alzheimers disease. We collected data about specialized dementia training and turnover among licensed nurses and nursing assistants in 400 nursing units in 124 Minnesota nursing facilities. Staff training may affect the retention of paraprofessional and professional nursing staff. A diversity of training methods, including workshops or seminars, films or videos, outside consultants, reading materials, training manuals, in-house experts, role playing techniques, or an orientation program for new staff, might be used to develop more effective training programs and reduce rates of nursing assistant turnover.

Beyond labels : nursing home care for Alzheimer's disease in and out of special care units

OBJECTIVE: To compare dementia special care units (SCUs) with their non‐SCU counterparts in terms of unit and facility characteristics.

Testing telehealth using technology-enhanced nurse monitoring

Technology-enhanced nurse monitoring is a telehealth solution that helps nurses with assessment, diagnosis, and triage of older adults living in community-based settings. This technology links biometric and nonbiometric sensors to a data management system that is monitored remotely by RNs and unlicensed support staff. Nurses faced a number of challenges related to data interpretation, including making clinical inferences from nonbiometric data, integrating data generated by three different telehealth applications into a clinically meaningful cognitive framework, and figuring out how best to use nursing judgment to make valid inferences from online reporting systems. Nurses developed expertise over the course of the current study. The sponsoring organization achieved a high degree of organizational knowledge about how to use these systems more effectively. Nurses saw tremendous value in the telehealth applications. The challenges, learning curve, and organizational improvements are described.

Client satisfaction with telehealth services in home health care agencies

We assessed client satisfaction with the home telemonitoring service provided by 14 home health care agencies in five US states. Clients were randomised to two groups. Telehealth services (health monitoring and patient safety) were provided to 450 experimental subjects. Control subjects (n = 409) received usual care. Clients were asked to rate their satisfaction with their service providers on 25 items, at baseline, 6 months post-discharge (to home) and 12 months post-discharge. The mean age of the clients was 78 years. Out of the initial 859 subjects, 490 had dropped out of the study by the 12-month follow-up, an overall attrition rate of 57%. There were similar proportions of clients reporting high satisfaction with external systems at baseline and at 6 months; at 12 months, there were significantly more clients in the experimental group who reported high satisfaction (P = 0.049). There were similar proportions of clients reporting high satisfaction with internal systems at baseline and at 12 months; at 6 months, there were significantly more clients in the experimental group who reported high satisfaction (P = 0.031). Clients with home monitoring were more satisfied with health-related and medical services post-discharge than those receiving usual care over a 6–12 month period.