Collaboration means working together to create something powerful and meaningful.
It’s what drives us at The John A. Hartford Foundation. We work closely with our Board of Trustees, grantees, health systems, and partners, both inside and outside the field of aging, because older adults deserve the best care possible.
Our three Priority Areas—Age-Friendly Health Systems, Family Caregiving, and Serious Illness and End of Life—taken together provide a comprehensive blueprint for improving care for older adults.
In 2018, we worked together to improve the care of older adults in many important ways:
Lile R. Gibbons, Trustee
- We attracted 125 teams from more than 75 health systems to be part of our growing Age-Friendly Health Systems initiative. Together with leading innovators in health care including the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, the American Hospital Association and the Catholic Health Association of the United States, we’ve created a dynamic virtual learning community grounded in the evidence-based 4Ms Framework.
- We sparked new innovative partnerships in aging and health. Our support of a multidisciplinary group of experts convened by the American Bar Association Commission on Law and Aging and the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine resulted in Advance Directives: Counseling Guide for Lawyers, a new resource to help attorneys draft clear advance directives that will be readily understood, easily available, and acted upon by their clients’ clinicians.
- We identified and spread critical best practices in family caregiving and advanced related policy. Along with the Milbank Memorial Fund, the May and Stanley Smith Charitable Trust, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, we launched Helping States Support Families Caring for an Aging America, a six-state initiative led by the Center for Health Care Strategies to reshape practice and policy to better support family caregivers of older adults.
As we reflect on the past year, we want to recognize the tremendous contributions of Charles A. Dana and Lile R. Gibbons, who retired from our Board of Trustees in 2018. We are indebted to them for their insight and leadership. We thank our Trustees for their commitment, our staff for their expert work, and our many grantees and partners for moving our work forward in exciting and impactful ways.
We look forward to 2019 and continuing our collaborative efforts to make extraordinary progress advancing our mission to improve the care of older adults.
Sincerely,
Terry Fulmer, PhD, RN, FAAN
President
Margaret L. Wolff
Chair of the Board
Trustees and Staff Working Together
Our success relies upon working together, and that spirit of collaboration starts with our own Trustees and staff. We are motivated by the philosophy of our founders John and George Hartford, who believed, “It is necessary to carve from the whole vast spectrum of human needs one small band that the heart and mind together tell you is the area in which you can make your best contribution.”
Striving for the impact envisioned by our founders, our Trustees and staff work hand-in-hand to advance our mission. Together, we study new and promising approaches to care, explore opportunities for future investment, conduct site visits to understand our impact, and—most importantly—we inspire each other.
The John A. Hartford Foundation Trustees Award
To honor colleagues who inspire us, in 2018 we created The John A. Hartford Foundation Trustees Award, presented to John R. Burton, MD, for his extraordinary lifetime dedication to improving care for older adults.
Dr. Burton, a renowned grantee, transformed clinical care by developing innovative models, spreading geriatrics expertise to surgical and related specialties, mentoring scores of clinical trainees, and helping develop a top-tier geriatrics program.
The Trustees and staff celebrate Dr. Burton’s inspiring decades of achievement.
Dr. John R. Burton receives The John A. Hartford Foundation Trustees Award in June 2018.
