The John A. Hartford Foundation blog

Putting the patient on the health care team is one of the core principles for which the Foundation has advocated for many years. During our Geriatric Interdisciplinary Team Training initiative, when we tried to team up nurses, social workers, and physicians (the minimum geriatric team), we often raised the ante and reminded the grantees of [...]

Last week, in the run-up to the passage of the health reform legislation, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, took a brief time-out from Washington politics to speak at the joint meeting of the American Society on Aging/National Council on Aging in Chicago.  In part her remarks were intended to persuade the audience [...]

Across many projects and partnerships, the Foundation has come to believe that high quality care for complex older adults MUST be team care.  Not only is there far too much work for any one provider, but the nature of the work requires a team to implement successfully.  Geriatric care is long-term care, not necessarily in [...]

At a meeting called by the Institute of Medicine to discuss its recent report,  Retooling the Healthcare Workforce for an Aging America, we focused on the particular issue of using team care to meet those needs. Reflecting on the IOM process, I observed that in addition to considering workforce issues from the traditional viewpoint of [...]