Safer Care for Older Persons (in residential) Environments (SCOPE)
Start/End Dates: 2010 - 2012
Investigators: Carole Estabrooks, Peter Norton, Greta Cummings, Professor, Lisa Cranley (PDF)
Decision Makers: Caroline Clark (AB), Belle Gowriluk (AB), Joanne Konnert (BC), Cindy Regier (BC)
Funder: Health Canada
Grant Amount: $750,000
Description: SCOPE will be conducted in a total of eight nursing homes in Alberta and British Columbia.
The purpose of SCOPE is to test a quality improvement (QI) model with the goal of:
- improving the safety and quality of care to elderly Canadians living in nursing homes; and
- improving the quality of work life for frontline caregivers in nursing homes.
The study is modeled on the Safer Healthcare Now (SHN!) national initiative which successfully enabled frontline teams primarily in acute care to use QI methods to implement new knowledge and best practices into direct patient care. SCOPE will facilitate implementation of SHN! strategies in the long term care sector.
SCOPE is focused on frontline caregivers (primarily health care aides) in nursing homes. Quality and safety improvement initiatives will be selected from a list of resident care indicators (e.g., falls, pain management) by the QI teams participating in the study. Over a 12 month period, research staff will work with the QI teams to monitor and evaluate the QI strategies using the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle of rapid change. Research staff will facilitate this process through a combination of regional and local face-to-face meetings and virtual education (teleconferencing). Process and outcome measures will be evaluated using various approaches (e.g., brief interviews, survey, RAI-MDS© 2.0 data). By working directly with health care aides, the intent is to increase their understanding of research based care, while providing opportunities for team collaboration.