Nursing home safety and quality of care has received much attention from the government, the long-term care industry, and consumers.

Although federal regulations have long required nursing homes to have a quality improvement program in place – and nursing homes have an abundance of guidelines and training materials available to them for this purpose – facilities’ quality of care and dedication to improvement continue to be inconsistent.

The Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (AHRQ) engaged Abt Global and partners SLH Clinical Consulting and Qualidigm to create an integrated safety and risk management program that could be used by nursing homes with a range of quality improvement capabilities and interests.

The program consolidated and refined existing materials from AHRQ’s On-Time Quality Improvement Program. The On-Time Program uses electronic medical record data to produce clinical decision support reports that alert staff to residents most at risk for adverse events. For this project, the Abt team revised and updated AHRQ’s existing On-Time modules—addressing fall prevention, pressure ulcer prevention and healing, avoidable hospitalization—based on input from a workgroup of nursing home staff, as well as a technical advisory panel.

For nursing homes without an electronic medical record or access to On-Time, the Abt team developed a resource package to support communication and prevention of adverse events, then pilot tested and revised it based on feedback from front line staff.

Read more about this work:
AHRQ’s Safety Program for Nursing Homes: On-Time Pressure Ulcer Prevention