JAG July 2019 Special Issue Editorial Introduction: Intervention Studies in Applied Gerontology
Year: 2019
Type: editorial
Abstract: Special Issue to a diverse set of intervention studies, all with direct applications to critically important problems in health care and quality of life for older adults.Target issues include late life care, nursing home leadership development, older adult research participation, fall prevention, physical activity, and cognitive training for people in the early stage of Alzheimer's disease.These articles provide the evidence base, through rigorous evaluation designs, for interventions that are ready for dissemination.Practitioners and policy makers should find this Special Issue particularly inspirational and constructive.The first article by Tetyana Shippee and colleagues presents LifeCare, in which lay health workers, called care guides, worked with people who have serious illnesses in late life to develop person-centered goals, drawing on a wide-ranging clinical support team across settings.The longitudinal, mixedmethods evaluation found lasting quality of life improvements in the intervention group compared with a usual care control group.This program targets people with a life expectancy of 3 years to 5 years, situating the program "upstream" of traditional end-of-life interventions, and broadens the typical limited array of diagnoses addressed.Belinda Dewar and colleagues next bring readers to Scotland, where they implemented a leadership support component for nursing home managers within the U.K.-wide My Home Life model.My Home Life seeks improvements for nursing home residents, families, and staff through culture change.Noting gaps in the literature on leadership in nursing homes, the authors tested a leadership support program based on work from other sectors demonstrating successful approaches to transformational leadership in complex systems.In a multimethod participatory study, the evaluation, grounded in contribution analysis theory, documented improvements in self-awareness, communication and relationship skills and developing positive culture.
Source: Journal of Applied Gerontology
Author: Julie Robison
Language: English
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2948717858