In Search of Hospice Information: Consumer Information Available on Hospice Compare and Yelp.

The hospice industry has expanded in recent years with limited oversight and few consumer-facing resources to assist consumers in selecting hospice agencies to care for their family members. To better understand the availability of consumer-facing hospice information and how hospices are evaluated by these websites, this study examined two websites with national reach-the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' Hospice Compare (HC) website and Yelp.com.

Home-Based Palliative Care: Toward a Balanced Care Design.

Palliative care for seriously ill adults is spreading rapidly, giving rise to a fast-growing business sector: the home-based palliative care (HBPC) industry. These programs offer services common to most palliative care programs; what distinguishes them is that services are delivered to patients in their homes. Research shows these programs hold promise for improving patient outcomes at lower cost than usual care.

Quality of Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment Forms Completed in Nursing Homes.

Background: The physician orders for life-sustaining treatment (POLST) form allows seriously ill individuals to express their preferences for end-of-life treatments. Despite increased POLST use, little is known about the quality of completed forms.

Objective: We examined the quality of POLST forms prepared for nursing home residents, including whether they had required signatures and clinically consistent care preferences.

Who Knew? Hospice Is a Business. What that Means for All of Us.

A seasoned gerontologist whose work has explored end-of-life care, I thought I knew what I was getting into when I undertook care for my brother Jim. In April 2014, Jim, whose health was then declining rapidly due to liver cancer, moved from his apartment in Minneapolis to my house in Santa Monica. Jim had come for a liver transplant evaluation at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Nursing Home Residents' Preferences on Physician Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment.

Purpose Of The Study: Previous studies examining preferences documented in Physician Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment (POLST) have found that most sampled POLSTs show a preference to limit care. These studies were conducted in states that are relatively ethnically homogeneous. This study investigated the POLST preferences of nursing home residents in an ethnically diverse state-California-that requires nursing homes to document whether residents execute POLST.

Implementing toileting trials in nursing homes: evaluation of a dissemination strategy.

Objectives: This study sought to improve incontinence care in nursing homes (NHs) by administering and evaluating a webinar course that provided extended instruction to help NHs implement toileting trials in accordance with recommended procedures. Of particular interest was: 1) whether the course design would prompt NH staffs to implement the recommended protocol, and 2) whether participants preferred this course design to other models.

Design: The study collected descriptive evaluation data.

Who transitions to the community from nursing homes? Comparing patterns and predictors for short-stay and long-stay residents.

Little is known about characteristics of those who transition to the community after long stays in nursing facilities. Yet this information is highly relevant to efforts to reduce preventable nursing facility use. This study identifies and compares community transition among short-stay (1-90 days) and long-stay residents (91-365 days) aged 65 + using Kaplan-Meier survival estimates and logistic regression to analyze 3,762 episodes of care in Southern California.

Distance coursework and coaching to improve nursing home incontinence care: lessons learned.

Objectives: To determine whether a distance coaching course on improving nursing home incontinence care could be replicated and brought to scale with a larger group of nursing homes without sacrificing outcomes.

Design: The study collected descriptive and comparative data.

Setting: Fourteen nursing homes in the original course and 34 in the replication course.

Resident characteristics related to the lack of morning care provision in long-term care.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine usual long-term care (LTC) practices related to 3 aspects of morning care and determine if there were resident characteristics related to the lack of care.

Design And Methods: Participants were 169 long-stay residents in 4 community LTC facilities who required staff assistance with either transfer out of bed, dressing, and/or incontinence care and were able to respond to structured interview questions about their morning care preferences. Trained research staff conducted standardized observations during 4 consecutive morning hours once per week per participant for 3 consecutive months during usual LTC conditions and interviewed participants about their morning care preferences using a structured interview protocol once per month during this same time period.

Translating research into practice in nursing homes: can we close the gap?

Purpose: A gap between research and practice in many nursing home (NH) care areas persists despite efforts by researchers, policy makers, advocacy groups, and NHs themselves to close it. The reasons are many, but two factors that have received scant attention are the dissemination process itself and the work of the disseminators or change agents. This review article examines these two elements through the conceptual lens of Roger's innovation dissemination model.

The coach is in: improving nutritional care in nursing homes.

Purpose:  This article describes and evaluates a long distance coaching course aimed at improving nutritional care in nursing homes (NHs). The course was structured to provide more support than traditional training programs offer. 

Methods:  In a series of 6 monthly teleconferences led by an expert in NH nutritional care, participating NH staff received step-by-step instructions for implementing an evidence-based nutritional management program.

Distance learning: a strategy for improving incontinence care in nursing homes.

Purpose: This article describes a distance learning model designed to help nursing homes implement incontinence management best practices. A basic premise is that translating research into practice requires both a feasible intervention and a dissemination strategy responsive to the target audience's needs.

Design And Methods: Over 8 months, nurse supervisors from 14 nursing homes in nine states learned how to implement prompted voiding during monthly 60- to 90-min teleconferences.

The nursing home Minimum Data Set assessment instrument: manifest functions and unintended consequences--past, present, and future.

The Minimum Data Set (MDS) is a uniform instrument used in nursing homes to assess residents. In January 2008, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services published a draft of a new MDS-version 3.0.

The nursing home culture-change movement: recent past, present, and future directions for research.

This article uses a retrospective approach to critique the research base underlying the nursing home culture-change movement-an effort to radically transform the nation's nursing homes by delivering resident-directed care and empowering staff. The article traces the development of the movement from its inception 10 years ago to 2005, when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services implemented its own initiative to support the movement, thus giving it new momentum, to the present day. This historical overview provides context for a proposed research agenda aimed at strengthening the movement's empirical base, thereby facilitating culture-change interventions as well as helping the movement navigate the next step in its evolution.