An Education Intervention to Enhance Staff Self-Efficacy to Provide Dementia Care in an Acute Care Hospital in Canada: A Nonrandomized Controlled Study.

Education is needed for enhanced capacity of acute hospitals to provide dementia care. A nonrandomized controlled, repeated-measures design was used to evaluate a dementia education program delivered to an intervention group (IG, n = 468), compared to a wait-listed group (n = 277), representing separate sites of a multisite hospital. Participants completed self-efficacy for dementia and satisfaction measures and provided written descriptions of dementia care collected at baseline, postintervention (IG only), and at 8-week follow-up.

Gentle persuasive approaches: introducing an educational program on an orthopaedic unit for staff caring for patients with dementia and delirium.

Gentle Persuasive Approaches in Dementia Care (GPA), a curriculum originally designed for long-term care, was introduced into an acute care setting. This person-centered approach to supporting and responding to persons with behaviors associated with dementia was shown to be applicable for staff on an orthopaedic surgery unit where they had reported significant challenges and care burdens when faced with behaviors such as shouting, explosiveness, and resistance to care. Staff confidence in their ability to care for persons with behaviors increased after attending the 1-day GPA workshop, and they reported being highly satisfied with the curriculum, found it to be applicable to their practice, indicated that it was also useful for patients with delirium, and would recommend it to others.

Designing a falls prevention strategy that works.

In implementing an evidence-based falls prevention strategy in acute care, planners are frequently pressed to meet organizational targets while allowing staff flexibility to match interventions with patient population needs and clinical realities. We describe the process of how one hospital creatively used evidence, systems change, staff engagement, expert consultation, policy and protocols, staff and patient education, marketing, and celebration to design and implement a falls prevention strategy on 60 clinical units that reduced annual fall rates by 20%.