Types of Projects Supported

The Awards will support initiatives that focus on facility staff education, quality improvement programs, research on interventions and treatment, and health literacy to directly enhance the quality of care provided to patients in Long Term Care settings.

Proposals may be submitted for a general Quality Improvement project or in any one of the five therapeutic areas listed below. The therapeutic areas are: pain management, dementia, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, or urinary incontinence.

Education

• Proposals in this category should focus on facility staff education and/or training programs.
  Due to a current Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality grant on assessment of Clinical Practice Guideline (CPG) implementation, the Foundation will not fund projects related to implementation of AMDA CPGs.

Quality Improvement Programs

• Proposals should focus on training and mentoring facilities or organizations in continuous quality improvement (CQI) or specific QI projects covering areas of interest to the Foundation.

Research Projects

• Research projects should be approximately one year in length and conducted in a single facility. Results should be generalizable.
• Examples could include an investigation into the characteristics of residents in the long term care setting whose weight loss is unavoidable, or a study looking at critical factors with hearing aid use.

Health Literacy

• Health literacy projects should focus on ways to enhance improving healthcare communications between long term care patients and their family/caregivers/surrogates. Devising such systems are particularly important given the diminished literacy skills, cognitive capacity and communication skills of many long term care residents, especially those with dementia.
• Examples could include projects that focus on the following: innovative ways to communicate given literacy and functional limitations (e.g., cognitive impairment, hearing or vision loss); different strategies for communicating given technological advances (e.g., e-mail, video-conferencing); and, methods of communicating with patients and families surrounding functional and disease-focused issues, taking into consideration diminished literacy skills and cultural differences.

Awards