Quality Partners announces that Marguerite McLaughlin, MA, Manager of Educational Development, has been appointed to serve on the National Association of Activity Professionals (NAAP) Advisory Council to focus on ways to develop community within long term care. NAAP represents Activity Professionals working in primarily geriatric settings and provides opportunities for professional development and personal growth.
Activities programs in nursing homes include a wide range of activities and services with the purpose of:
Seifert Systems Invests in Energy Efficiency to Strengthen Operations
For manufacturers, energy is more than just another operating expense. It plays a critical role…
Learn More
•Enabling residents to react and interact with their environment
•Helping residents shape their destinies, to find new and satisfying social relationships
•Being self-directing and spontaneous
The care team of staff, family, residents and volunteers work together to plan and carry out activities program. Teams develop programs to meet the needs of the each resident as the resident defines them. In other words, the programs are part of individualized care provided by the nursing home.
An expert in individualized care (culture change), Marguerite led the development of the Holistic Approach to Transformational Change (HATCh) model, a holistic approach to individualized care that can be used as a guiding philosophy to assist with a nursing home’s culture change journey. This organizational culture change model includes six inter-related topic areas (domains) that lead to individual, organizational, community and systems changes. The decision to adopt each of these domains, along with the interconnectedness of the domains, was carefully considered and key to facilitating change.
Culture change and the journey towards individualized care is a relationship-based model. To support this model, national and local leaders in long term care must begin to construct, develop and establish specific ways to engineer and build community in a much more deliberate way. Ultimately, community is the heart of the culture change movement. Creating community involves strengthening relationships within the nursing home while establishing porous boundaries with the greater community in which the nursing home lives.
On October 30, 2009 The Advisory Council brought together a group of experts – including culture change experts from around the country—for a day-long meeting. Starting points for these discussions looked at community, the roles and positions that affect community in a deliberate way, the partnerships and education that would be necessary to ensure it. Going forward, the group hopes to infuse new life into the activity profession through the development and implementation of a new curriculum.
About Quality Partners: Quality Partners of Rhode Island is a non-profit healthcare quality improvement agency based in Providence, Rhode Island that provides consulting, research and education services. We collaborate with national and local government agencies, healthcare providers, stakeholders, insurers, educational institutions and foundations on many healthcare quality improvement initiatives. With a staff of over thirty physicians, nurses, educators, analysts and other healthcare professionals, this agency is viewed within the healthcare industry as a local and national leader in quality improvement.
