Background: In 2022, the US Department of Health and Human Services released the first National Strategy to Support Family Caregivers, identifying actions for both government and the private sector. One of the major goals is to expand data, research, and evidence-based practices to support family caregivers. While IT tools are widely deployed in health care settings, they are rarely available at scale in community agencies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: With the aging population, family caregivers provide increasingly complex and intense care for older adults and persons with disabilities. There is growing interest in developing community-based services to support family caregivers. Caregiving occurs around the clock, and caregivers face challenges in accessing community-based services at convenient times owing to the demands of care.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNearly 53 million family caregivers in the United States provide care to older adults, performing tasks ranging from meal preparation and grocery shopping, to wound care and medication management. While caregivers are critical to the health care system, they are not adequately supported to serve in this role. Successfully integrating family caregivers into the health care team and supporting their health and well-being is a public health priority and should be a focus for clinical education programs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The imperative of medicine is to treat suffering and to cure when possible. This learning module has been designed to expand providers' knowledge of how to sustain life, restore health, relieve suffering, and provide comfort for people who are experiencing cancer-induced pain. The module uses cancer pain as the context through which students can learn interprofessional, team-based, and person-centered approaches to delivery of care.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe number of older adults living with functional decline and serious illness is growing exponentially at a time when availability of both family and professional caregivers is strained. Achieving optimal outcomes for this vulnerable population involves advancing the knowledge needed to improve the quality of care delivered by families, health professionals, and community programs. Recent reports from National Institute of Health and the National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine have called for the identification of gaps in key areas of family caregiving intervention research.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: "The ongoing opioid crisis lies at the intersection of two substantial public health challenges-reducing the burden of suffering from pain and containing the rising toll of the harms that can result from the use of opioid medications" [1]. Improved pain education for health care providers is an essential component of the multidimensional response to both still-unmet challenges [2,3]. Despite the importance of licensing examinations in assuring competency in health care providers, there has been no prior appraisal of pain and related content within the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe benefits of interprofessional education (IPE) amongst health professionals are well documented, however, the implementation of interprofessional initiatives across the USA is inconsistent. This report describes the development and content of a number of IPE initiatives that are in the early stages of development and implementation at the University of California, Davis, USA. The article describes several important factors that were found to be necessary for the initial implementation of these IPE initiatives.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: The objective of this project was to develop core competencies in pain assessment and management for prelicensure health professional education. Such core pain competencies common to all prelicensure health professionals have not been previously reported.
Methods: An interprofessional executive committee led a consensus-building process to develop the core competencies.
Successful chronic care ideally involves patient engagement, but little is known about chronically ill older adults' ability to self-manage their health. This study examines activation among hypertensive patients older than 65 years. Almost 60% of participants scored in the bottom half of the activation scale; only 8% scored at the highest level.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Blood pressure (BP) control remains elusive for many Americans. Although home health nurses are uniquely positioned to help vulnerable individuals achieve BP control, hypertension (HTN) management has not been a high priority in post-acute care.
Objective: To examine the effects of two home-based interventions designed to improve BP outcomes among high-risk African-American patients.
Efforts to increase blood pressure (BP) control rates in blacks, a traditionally underserved high-risk population must address both provider practice and patient adherence issues. The home-based BP Intervention for blacks study is a 3-arm randomized controlled trial designed to test 2 strategies to improve hypertension management and outcomes in a decentralized service setting serving a vulnerable and complex home care population. The primary study outcomes are systolic BP, diastolic BP, and BP control; secondary outcomes are nurse adherence to hypertension management recommendations and patient adherence to medication, healthy diet, and other self-management strategies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To examine whether reimbursement for Provider Counseling, Pharmacotherapies, and a telephone Quitline increase smoking cessation relative to Usual Care.
Study Design: Randomized comparison trial testing the effectiveness of four smoking cessation benefits.
Setting: Seven states that best represented the national population in terms of the proportion of those > or = 65 years of age and smoking rate.
Purpose: The study purpose was to identify barriers to mammography screening among women with different disabilities and to suggest interventions to address barriers.
Methods: Forty-two women with self-reported disabilities, ages 40 to 69 years participated. They resided in 24 Connecticut towns, and most had a prior mammogram.