Celebrating Ten Years of Improving Health Care for Older Adults
Making Best Geriatric Practice
Standard Practice
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Strategy No. 4: Creating a Forum to Enhance Policy Around Geriatric Nursing
As part of its effort to raise the profile and prominence of nursing care for older adults, the fourth strategy of the Hartford Institute for Geriatric Nursing involves shaping public policy. Activities to reach these important audiences have included bringing together leaders and key players in geriatric nursing to discuss issues of public policy related to geriatric nursing, supporting the Coalition of Geriatric Nursing Organizations, and writing the “Nursing Counts” newsletter, which is published as a column in the American Journal of Nursing.
Serving a Convening Function
The Hartford Institute is in a unique position to bring together leaders from various sectors of health care who would not otherwise meet and to create a forum for dialogue on issues of public policy around geriatric nursing. "The Hartford Institute provides the umbrella to bring together diverse points of view and to forward the field of nursing," says Dr. Mezey. Three major invitational conferences have been held, focusing on nurse staffing standards in nursing homes, use of geriatric nurse practitioners in long-term care, and the teaching nursing home as a model of care.With partial support in 1998 from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (then known as the Agency for Health Care Policy Research), the Hartford Institute gathered a national expert panel to propose a research agenda on nurse staffing standards in long-term care and recommended nurse staffing levels that were cited by the Senate Committee on Aging and in the New York Times.
In 2003, the Hartford Institute and the American Medical Directors Association, in collaboration with the Coalition of Geriatric Nursing Organizations convened an Expert Panel Meeting to review the state of knowledge and caseloads of advance practice nurses in nursing homes. As a result of the meeting, the Hartford Institute prepared a summary of recommendations regarding utilization and caseload parameters. The recommendations for strengthening the use of advanced practice nurses in nursing homes were published in the October 2005 issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.
An initiative called the Teaching Nursing Home Project received funding from the Health Resources and Services Administration to explore the feasibility of using nursing homes to serve as model sites to implement initiatives designed to improve the education, skills, and overall preparation of health professionals who care for nursing home residents. In March 2005, an invitational summit was held by the Hartford Institute to discuss the project. National experts representing practice, education, regulation, and culture change met to generate principles and actions that should be associated with a teaching nursing home, and two pilot sites implemented aspects of the program.
Organized by the Hartford Institute in October 2001, the Coalition of Geriatric Nursing Organizations represents over 20,000 geriatric nurses seeking to improve the health care of older adults across care settings. The Coalition has two major goals: to positively affect the quality of long-term care through improving and implementing "Pioneer Network" nursing home reform practices and to facilitate the measurement of quality in long-term care by supporting and advancing the "Minimum Data Set" and other tools appropriate for the long-term care setting, including quality indicators and measures derived from those instruments.