Perspectives of certified nursing assistants and administrators on staffing the nursing home frontline during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Objective: To identify best practices to support and grow the frontline nursing home workforce based on the lived experience of certified nursing assistants (CNAs) and administrators during COVID-19.

Study Setting: Primary data collection with CNAs and administrators in six New York metro area nursing homes during fall 2020.

Study Design: Semi-structured interviews and focus groups exploring staffing challenges during COVID-19, strategies used to address them, and recommendations moving forward.

The Role of Unpaid Volunteers in a Group Caregiving Approach: Validation of the Share the Care™ Program.

Share The Care™ (STC) is a caregiving program that has been guiding people on how to pool their skills and resources to assist someone facing a health, aging, or medical crisis. The purpose of this research was to conduct a descriptive program evaluation to establish STC as an advanced program within the caregiver continuum that helps to alleviate caregiver burnout and isolation through the formation of an organized "caregiving family" for support. A sample of 134 participants completed an online questionnaire and 7 participated in follow-up phone interviews.

"This case is closed": family caregivers and the termination of home health care services for stroke patients.

Policies promoting home- and community-based services and disease management models implicitly rely on family care, still the bedrock of long-term and chronic care in the United States. The United Hospital Fund studied family caregivers of stroke and brain injury patients when home care cases were opened and closed and found that even with short-term formal services, family caregivers provided three-quarters of the care. Patients' mobility impairments and Medicaid eligibility were the main factors in determining the amount and duration of formal services.

More care at home: the challenge of creating viable community alternatives to nursing home care.

Creating a national long-term care (LTC) delivery "infrastructure"--one that would make home-based care more accessible to people with extensive needs--will be a major undertaking. It will require new service organizations that have the authority to provide and coordinate an appropriate array of services. Medicaid Managed Long-Term Care (MLTC) and the Programs of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) offer two promising examples of what the service organizations of the future might look like.