The John A. Hartford Foundation blog

In the beginning of November, I spoke about nurse-led change at the American Academy of Nursing’s annual meeting. If we are going to reform the health care system, I said, nurses must be at the forefront of change. Nurses have the most contact with patients; they are the most highly respected profession in America, according [...]

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 [...]

As part of its theory of change, the Foundation has made big bets on the specialty of geriatric medicine. (Click here  for a nice summary of what geriatricians do.) Unfortunately, we are losing the numbers game. Geriatric medicine is the only specialty in which a physician takes a pay cut in return for additional advanced [...]

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 [...]