Kathleen Unroe, M.D., MHA, M.S., explains how quality care for people with dementia is paramount to nursing home care.
Transcript:
Quality care for people with cognitive impairment, including people with a diagnosis of dementia, is fundamental to nursing home care. There are some standards around the need for training for staff, but those need to be continually examined, addressed and upgraded to make sure there is sufficient training. Another way that we can work to ensure that best practice dementia care is being delivered in nursing homes is through the way we measure quality. Often we are limited in our quality metrics — especially quality metrics that we’re trying to gather across all 16,000 nursing homes in the country — to items that are easy to measure, but we need to continue to push ourselves to pull from the existing data and electronic health records and other sources to create metrics that demonstrate delivery of high quality dementia care.
