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Better care for the elderly By Gigi Wood Iowa City Press-Citizen July 21,
2003 Seventy Iowa nursing homes, including several locally, are participating in a new federal program to improve care for their residents. The nursing homes will receive specialized technical assistance and training from the state's quality improvement organization, the Iowa Foundation for Medical Care. The assistance is provided at no charge to the homes through the foundation's contract with Medicare. Each nursing home will choose one area to improve upon - either reducing infection, reducing the loss of daily activity or chronic pain reduction. Iowa Foundation nurses will be on site to help staff improve on those areas and assist them with initiating the changes. Marta Urdanet, administrator at the Solon Nursing Care Center, said she and her staff have not yet decided which area they will focus on. "It may be pain management because we've been focusing on that for some time. But that may not turn out to be the best way to go," Urdanet said. "Our staff is going through the forms now and we may get a better set of ideas." Changes in administrative staff have slowed their progress, she added. As participating nursing homes develop solutions for improving quality, the information will be shared with the other 460 nursing homes across the state. "We're really excited to get good data, not only for ourselves but to spread across the state," Urdanet said. "We look forward to working with these homes to develop best practices for improving nursing home quality," said Kim Downs, a spokeswoman for the Iowa Foundation. "Each home will identify a specific quality measure that they will focus on. All nursing homes across Iowa and around the country will benefit by sharing this information." This program was launched in late 2002 by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a federal agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Every
nursing home in the country is required to report on several quality
measures pertaining to patient care. Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging
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