Vote for ‘Creating Value in Nursing Homes’, nominated in the ValueBased HealthCare Prize 2021

We are very proud that our project on “Creating Value in Nursing Homes” has been nominated for the Value Based HealthCare Prize 2021. It is the only project out of 12 nominees that focuses on nursing homes and people with dementia. On May 19^th 2021 the winner will be presented. Please vote for our project via: http://vbhcprize.com/nominees-2021-vote-for-your-favorite-now/

To vote for our initiative, you have to select initiative 3 ‘Creating Value in Nursing Homes’, enter a valid email address and click on ‘vote’.

We believe that good care in nursing homes is established through partnership between staff, residents and their family caregivers. This means that the experience of care is built on interactions between people involved and together they create value in everyday life. Especially people with dementia rely on their environment for engaging in every daily life. To improve care in these networks, nursing homes require to be learning organizations as the complexity increased due to the ever-changing environment and the complexity of care provision.

Our project has been developed with partners of the Living Lab in Ageing & Long-Term Care (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12603-019-1288-5 ). Here, we have established a learning community of staff, family, and residents for improvement of relationship-centered care. The aim of our project is to facilitate and create an open learning and improvement climate in nursing homes to increase experienced quality of care (for residents and family members) and work (for staff). To reach this aim, residents, their family members and representatives, care staff, CEOs of care organizations, researchers and educators (working at a university, a university of applied sciences or a vocational training institute) collaborate.

In our project we use the Connecting Conversations approach to assess and improve experienced quality of care from the resident’s perspective (Sion et al. 2020). It creates a learning network as staff from one organizations visit another organisation. Here they have separate interviews with a resident, their family member and care staff of that resident. Key elements of Connecting Conversations are that experienced quality of care is seen as dynamic process of expectations and whether or not they are met, that it involves all three stakeholders (residents, family members, staff), and that it adopts a positive approach through supporting conversations about what is going well. Results of the Connecting Conversations are used in the short-cyclical evaluations within the learning communities, providing insight into what is going well and what could be learned or improved regarding experienced quality of care. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, only a few Connecting Conversations could take place in 2020. In four wards, staff and/or family were additionally invited to participate in group conversations on how they perceived the pandemic. Participants of the group conversations indicated that these conversations were helpful in creating a shared understanding of how the pandemic was experienced by different parties.

Do you want to help us to take this Community Award home? In this short video, we explain why you should vote for our initiative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsWr1DySkRk

You can vote via: http://vbhcprize.com/nominees-2021-vote-for-your-favorite-now/

Voting is possible until 18 May.

Thank you very much for your support!

Prof. dr. Hilde Verbeek (Prof. of Long-Term Care Environments, Living Lab Ageing & Long-Term Care, Maastricht University, The Netherlands)

Dr. Ramona Backhaus (Senior Researcher, Living Lab Ageing & Long-Term Care, Maastricht University, The Netherlands)