The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety Paper: The Urgent Need for the Age-Friendly Health Systems Movement
The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety has published a paper, "The Urgent Need for the Age-Friendly Health Systems Movement."
The authors, Institute for Healthcare Improvement's (IHI) Kedar Mate and Leslie Pelton, highlight how the demographic shift, and the needs of older adults, may not be well aligned with the capabilities of our current health care systems. They call for improving care for older adults by adopting the person-centered approach of the Age-Friendly Health Systems 4Ms Framework (what matters, medication, mentation and mobility).
The 4Ms Framework was designed to support and propel an authentic movement in healthcare. At least 2,700,000 older adults have been reached by age-friendly care, and the initiative has spurred parallel activities. This uptake, the paper notes, reflects the 4Ms Framework's effectiveness, and details how much of the work to embed the 4Ms Framework as the standard of care is already underway.
What needs to change for all older adults to benefit from AFHS is at the macro-system level (above the organization). This includes regulators, policy makers, and payers.
The authors describe how stakeholder groups can identify and highlight how the 4Ms are already integrated in their regulations, policies and the care they pay for, and they also detail how stakeholders can also develop new regulations and policies that integrate the 4Ms into regulatory and payment frameworks that are essential to sustaining improvements.
It is time, the authors say, for key players at all levels of our health systems to use all levers to reliably establish the 4Ms of Age-Friendly care as a standard for caring for all older adults.
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Learn more about the AFHS initiative.
Learn more about JAHF's co-support of the AFHS initiative.