Culture Change Programs
Nursing homes are changing. They are staffed by care givers who are there to help their community's residents. Residents are becoming more vocal and involved in decisions about their care, as are family members. This comprehensive approach to the living and working environment in nursing homes is culture change.
The California Culture Change Coalition has programs, practical information and advice on restructuring nursing home and reorganizing the way they work. Training and learning about culture change is a necessity for transforming a nursing home. List below are some of the programs California Culture Change Coalition offers to help establish this innovative movement in nursing homes.
Click on the links below to read more about California Culture Change Coalition's programs:
Regional Learning Collaboratives
Person-Centered Dining Project
Person-Centered End-of-Life Care
Regional Learning Collaboratives
The adoption of culture change practices is both exciting and challenging. It is natural for staff to want to fall back on the tried and true and to have concerns about change. The learning collaboratives are designed to provide your team with the coaching and mentoring you need in order to adopt successful strategies of transformational change.
The regional learning collaboratives provide the opportunity for a team from your nursing home to learn theory and then apply the theories in practice. The teams meet for a year. The learning collaboratives are designed to provide you with the coaching and mentoring you need in order to adopt strategies of transformational change.
Find out more about Regional Collaboratives.
Person-Centered Dining Project
In 2007, CAHF embarked on a pilot project with the California Culture Change Coalition and CMS Region IX to test out several dining innovations in skilled nursing facilities. Eleven nursing homes volunteered to try out a new practice that expanded the dining choices for people living in their facilities.
Three practices were piloted:
1. restaurant style
2. buffet style, and an
3. expanded snack program.
The experiences of these providers and the “lessons learned” are described in the “Person Directed Dining Package.” The project began in January 2008 with an orientation of participating facilities and concluded in October 2008 with the release of the practice packages.
Find out more about the Dining Project.
Person-Centered End-of-Life Care
In 2009 the California Culture Change Coalition in partnership with the Coalition for Compassionate Care of California received a grant from the California HealthCare Foundation to promote person-centered end-of-life care and to encourage the use of Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST). POLST is a form that follows the patient across settings and states what kind of medical treatment patients want toward the end of their lives.
The first of two major initiatives, resulted in the creation of the CARE Recommendations, a manual and toolkit designed to be used by staff serving residents in nursing homes. The purpose of the manual is to:
- Facilitate conversations with residents and family members to clarify goals of care in light of the individual resident’s specific preferences.
- Provide care that addresses residents’ physical needs, while also honoring their emotional, psycho-social, and spiritual needs.
- Establish rituals that acknowledge the sacredness of the human spirit in residents, staff and family members.
- Create a culture in which resident’s individual needs and preferences are known and honored.
Following publication of the CARE Recommendations the Coalition incorporated person-centered end-of-life care practices into the curriculum of the Regional Collaboratives. The Coalition established a survey tool for California nursing homes that participated in Regional Collaborative training programs to study the utilization of the POLST form and to determine if the adoption of better end-of-life care practices reduces the number of unnecessary hospital transfers.