hacvrnewIn addition to the good news of Health Affairs focusing on long-term care coupled with the additional bad news on hospital readmissions from skilled nursing facilities, as I reported a few weeks ago, this special issue of Health Affairs had many other features of interest. A non-exhaustive list includes:

Susan Reinhard, senior vice president of AARP’s Public Policy Institute and leader of a project to enhance nurse and social worker training in support of family caregivers, had a paper discussing promising strategies to help older adults move from nursing homes to less restrictive care—or avoid nursing homes altogether. Although effective, these initiatives are underutilized.

Diane Meier, leader of the Center to Advance Palliative Care at Mt. Sinai in New York, wrote a commentary on the need to implement palliative care in nursing homes. With her co-authors, she argues that essentially anyone in institutional long-term care is at the point where they would benefit from the application of the person-centered principles that are core to palliative care.

In a “report from the field” on the real-life experiences of home care workers, Howard Gleckman of the Urban Institute captures the physical challenges, low pay, but deep meaning many direct care workers find in their relationships with their clients. He cites data by PHI, the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute, to support the in-depth stories of several direct care workers.

We were also proud that the round-up of philanthropic activities in long-term care authored by Lauren LeRoy and other staff at Grantmakers in Health (one of our key funder affiliation associations) noted the Hartford Foundation’s long-time association with On Lok/PACE, and of course with health care workforce development.

It’s great to see issues surrounding long-term care begin to get the serious attention they deserve.