Enhancing research in elder care

1. Enhancing research in elder care A-M Bostrom PhD, Postdoctoral Dementia and Veterans Fellow, CA Estabrooks RN, PhD, Prof, Faculty of Nursing, University of Alberta,DL Milke PhD Senior Researcher, CapitalCare & Adj Assoc Prof, University of Alberta& B Kolewaski RN, BScN, Administrator, CapitalCare Kipnes Centre for Veterans Background In 2007, CIHR - Institute of Aging announced the first competition for Dementia and Veterans Post Doctoral Fellowships. These involve a joint appointment between universities and currently are located at only three clinical settings in Canada. The goals for the fellowships are to build research capacity to advance clinical knowledge and practice in the field of Dementia and Veterans care in both the university and the clinical settings. On April 1 2008, Dr. Anne-Marie Bostrom, a graduate of KarolinskaInstitutet, Sweden, was awarded the first of these fellowships. • Audit & Feedback Project • Audit and Feedback is reported to be an efficient intervention to enhance research use. • Information in the literature is insufficient, however. • We need better “user-friendly” reports so best practice leaders and managers can better support staff in increasing quality of care. • Audit and feedback tools will be developed for staff at the Kipnes Centre for Veterans using Resident Assessment Instrument (MDS RAI) 2.0 data. • Two phases are envisioned: interviews with managers and staff about their current use and experience of using MDS RAI 2.0 for quality improvement, and development of a suite of relevant tools to test and evaluate. Dementia and Veterans Postdoctoral fellowship Dr. Bostrom’s fellowship provides three years of post-doctoral work at the University of Alberta and the CapitalCareKipnes Centre for Veterans in Edmonton. The work is focused on increasing knowledge about research utilization in elder care and involves several projects. She is supervised by Dr. Carole Estabrooks, Faculty of Nursing, Principal Investigator for the research program Translating Research in Elder Care. • Nutrition Project • Studies in Sweden and elsewhere have revealed that a majority of older persons living in nursing homes are malnourished or at risk for malnutrition. Malnourishment is associated with higher risk for falls and pressure sores, impaired wound healing, etc. • A pilot project will use the Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA), which was developed and validated to assess nutritional status among elders, to examine the nutritional status among elders living in Kipnes Centre for Veterans. • MDS RAI 2.0 provides quarterly assessments and 10 of the 18 questions in the MNA can be obtained from RAI data. The research team will ask the elders (or staff, if necessary) to answer the remaining MNA items. • B. Kolewaski, the centre administrator will work with the team and staff to address any risks found. • Quality of Life Project • This project is aimed at finding valid and reliable instruments for measuring Quality of Life (QoL) for elders with dementia, especially for those living in nursing homes. • We will do a systematic review of published studies that have tested such instruments for this population. • We will test 2-3 instruments in our interventions studies for enhancing research in elder care. QoL is viewed as an outcome measure in intervention studies in these settings. Acknowledgement Fellowship funding: Canadian Institutes of Health Research – Institute of Aging, CapitalCare Foundation, and Alberta Heritage Foundation of Medical Research