Biomedical subjects

Ellen Flaherty

Publications and source records attributed to Ellen Flaherty.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Geriatric interdisciplinary team training program: evaluation results.

Geriatric interdisciplinary team training has long been a goal in health education with little progress. In 1997, the John A. Hartford Foundation funded eight programs nationally to create Geriatric Interdisciplinary Team Training (GITT) programs. Faculty trained 1,341 health professions students. The results of the evaluation, including presentation of new measures developed to assess interdisciplinary knowledge, are presented, and the implications of the program as a model of interdisciplinary education are discussed. Evaluation data from 537 student trainees are presented. At posttest, GITT trainees demonstrated improvement on all measures of attitudinal change, no change on the geriatric care planning measure, and a change in some of the questions on the test of team dynamics that varied by discipline. Changes were greatest for all the attitudinal measures with the self-reported Team Skills Scale indicating the most significant change--a change that is significant across medicine, nursing, and social work trainees.

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PubMed2003

The geriatric interdisciplinary team training (GITT) program.

Geriatric interdisciplinary team training (GITT) is an initiative funded by the John A. Hartford Foundation since 1995. Building from the substantial knowledge gained from the Veteran's Administration project in interdisciplinary team training and lessons from the Pew Foundation initiative, GITT was reconceived by the Foundation to address the need for teams in the care of older adults in the new era of managed care and health care cost containment. This training program has served to help us understand attitudes toward teams, how teams function, and how teams should be trained in the changing health care environment, where length of stay is dramatically different from the earlier team training projects. This introductory paper provides an overview of GITT, and the companion papers give detail of the GITT curricula, measures and lessons learned.

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PubMed2003

Frail older patient care by interdisciplinary teams: a primer for generalists.

Frail older patients-unlike younger persons in the health care system or even well elders-require complex care. Most frail older patients have multiple chronic illnesses. Optimum care cannot be achieved by following the paradigm of ongoing traditional health care, which emphasizes disease and cure. Because no one health care professional can possibly have all of the specialized skills required to implement such a model of health care delivery, interdisciplinary team care has evolved. This paper describes the roles of the participating team members in the context of interdisciplinary care for frail older adults. In addition, the challenges that occur when Geriatric Interdisciplinary (ID) Teams involved in providing care to frail older patients are identified and discussed.

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PubMed2003

Using case studies to evaluate students' ability to develop a geriatric interdisciplinary care plan.

The Geriatric Interdisciplinary Team Training (GITT) program, an educational intervention funded by The John A. Hartford Foundation of New York City, has trained more than 1800 health care professions students and clinicians throughout the United States. Evaluating the effectiveness of this training intervention has proven to be quite a challenge. Core measures were collected pre- and post-GITT training to evaluate student development as a result of GITT. This paper focuses on one of these core measures, the Test of Geriatric Interdisciplinary Care Planning (TGICP). This instrument, developed for the GITT program, is one mechanism created to test trainees' ability to develop an interdisciplinary plan of care. Using a case study methodology, this two-part instrument provides an innovative approach to quantifying and correlating responses from an interdisciplinary cohort of students. This paper will describe the development of the TGICP, including the creation and validation of the case studies, the framework for the questionnaire, and the coding and scoring mechanism created to evaluate trainee responses.

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PubMed2003

Using scripted video to assess interdisciplinary team effectiveness training outcomes.

As part of the Geriatric Interdisciplinary Team Training (GITT) Program funded by the John A. Hartford Foundation, the authors of this article worked to create an instrument, the Trainee Test of Team Dynamics, to assess health care trainees' understanding of team dynamics. The Trainee Test of Team Dynamics is a five-question written test designed to capture GITT trainees' knowledge of team process and skills in addressing conflict that is administered after watching a five-minute videotape of a simulated interdisciplinary health care team meeting. The test was created to measure health professions students' abilities to recognize effective geriatric health care teams, to respond to effective and ineffective team behaviors, and to determine whether or not the team meeting achieved its purpose: to meet the patient's needs for an interdisciplinary care plan. Scripts and test items developed and tested by practitioners in social work, medicine, public health, nursing and others assured a product that compensated for differences in educational level and occupation, yet captured accurate and appropriate responses. The results reported here include an analysis of 740 trainees' baseline responses from the multi-site educational programs to determine the construct validity of the new measure.

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PubMedDate not supplied

Gerontologic nurse practitioner preceptor guide.

Geriatric nurse practitioners (GNPs) often serve as clinical preceptors for nurse practitioner students. The Nursing Interest Group of the John A. Hartford Foundation's Geriatric Interdisciplinary Team Training Program recognized a need for a condensed guide that clarifies the role of a GNP preceptor. This guide uses information from the literature to clarify the role of the preceptor, offer suggestions for clinical teaching, provide guidance to determine expectations for student performance, and delineate the progression of a nurse practitioner student. This article reviews the contents of the guide and offers suggestions for its use in clinical practice.

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PubMedDate not supplied

Agitation and depression in frail nursing home elderly patients with dementia: treatment characteristics and service use.

OBJECTIVE: The authors describe characteristics, treatment, and acute service use associated with agitation and depression in dementia. METHODS: Authors used retrospective chart review of symptoms, physician-level prescribing, and acute service use over 3 months for 2,487 physically frail older residents, including 1,836 with dementia, (mean age: 79.8 years) in 109 long-term care facilities, describing differences between uncomplicated dementia and three mutually exclusive subgroups of complicated dementia, including dementia with agitation-only, dementia with depression-only, and dementia with mixed agitation and depression. RESULTS: Compared with the other subgroups, frail elderly patients with dementia complicated by mixed agitation and depression have the highest rate of hospitalization, the greatest number of medical diagnoses, and the greatest medical severity, and they receive the greatest number of psychiatric medications. Depression in dementia (either alone or mixed with agitation) was associated with greater prevalence of pain. CONCLUSIONS: Dementia complicated by mixed agitation and depression accounts for over one-third of complicated dementia and is associated with multiple psychiatric and medical needs, intensive pharmacological treatment, and use of high-cost services. Research should target this complex, high-risk group to develop appropriate diagnostic criteria and effective treatment interventions.

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