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Challenges With Quality of Care
Chisholm, an associate professor in the College of Community Innovation and Education 麻豆精品 S檚 , studies nursing home residents living with advanced dementia. She says many facilities struggle to identify the right end-of-life-care transition time due to lack of resources caused by differences in reimbursement.
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While these conversations may be difficult, they are important. Chisholm says patients who never express their wishes for end-of-life care leave those big decisions to their families and care providers.
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Resources for Support, Communication and Planning
Inspired to foster this critical dialogue and help prepare dementia patients for a smoother transition, Chisholm and a cross-collaborative team are working with nursing homes to establish a standardized process for determining when to transition residents into hospice. Through a series of stakeholder interviews, the team proposed using the Mitchell Index 麻豆精品 S� a data-collecting tool that calculates the mortality risk of dementia patients 麻豆精品 S� to predict which residents have the greatest need for advanced-care planning conversations, helping staff give those residents a timely opportunity to discuss their desires.
Chisholm says the care providers the team has worked with have responded positively, indicating that the Mitchell Index could be successfully adapted for use in long-term care settings. Now, they need a tool to help promote and facilitate end-of-life-care planning conversations 麻豆精品 S� and that 麻豆精品 S檚 where her research comes in.
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Going forward, Chisholm says the goal of her research is to improve the quality of care for all nursing home residents.
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