Describes the Mental Health Consultation Team at the Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center nursing home. The team is an interdisciplinary group of mental health professionals and primary care providers. Cooperation among these professionals has decreased the demands for formal psychiatry and psychology consultations while increasing mental…

Describes an 11-week course given at a nursing home to nursing home aides that focused on abnormal psychology and behavior intervention skills. Discusses the course goals, class composition, and course description. Addresses the problems and issues encountered with teaching this course to a nontraditional population in an unconventional setting.…

Purpose: Turnover in nursing homes is a widespread problem adversely affecting care quality. Using complexity theory, we tested the effect of administrative climate, communication patterns, and the interaction between the two on turnover, controlling for facility context. Design and Methods: Perceptions of administrative climate and communication…

Terminology in the Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) Scale of DSM-IV often is irrelevant to the realities of nursing homes, assisted living centers, and similar facilities in which residents encounter stressors that are unique to their living environment and circumstances. As the mental health needs of long-term care residents are…

The physical and social environments are recognized as important therapeutic tools in the care of nursing home residents with dementia, yet little is known about the environments of rural nursing homes. This study was conducted in one rural health authority (16,000 km[superscript 2]) in the province of Saskatchewan. Long-term institutional care…

Purpose: Bringing state-subsidized assisted living services (ALS) into congregate housing (CH) is a strategy for reducing rates of nursing home placement. This article discusses CH residents' reactions as a new ALS program was introduced in their housing, and it provides recommendations for others who are considering the implementation of similar…

Literature on health professionals describes the problems associated with unresolved or poorly resolved grief. Previous research has indicated that the most important reason why health professionals stay in their jobs is their relationship to patients. This study examined how nursing home personnel resolve their grief following deaths of clients.…

The demand for long term care is growing as the population in need of services becomes older and frailer, and as the nature of the family, the economy, and the health care system changes. To investigate the long term care system, its characteristics, trends, financing, policies, availability, and quality of care, 700 health care professionals,…

After spending seven weeks in a nursing home, nursing students came away from the experience with a new respect for the aged, a realistic idea of the problems facing the nursing staff in the extended care facility, and new image of nursing homes. (Author)

Staff and residents of settings for the aged often hold substantially different views of their shared environment, and the literature suggests that these perceptual discrepancies transcend such factors as degree of institutional totality, quality of care, and differences in personal characteristics among staff and residents. Despite the…

Because of administrative difficulties, therapeutic services provided at a nursing home by Project Adapt, through the St. Louis (Missouri) Regional Community Placement Program, were discontinued. At 2-month intervals, from June through December, 1986, 10 residents from the home where services were discontinued were compared with 10 and 15…

This manual was developed by the staff of the Read Aloud Programs for the Elderly of the Seattle Public Library. It is based on a year's experience of conducting read-aloud programs in nursing homes and is meant to be a guide for setting up similar programs in other library systems. The first half of the manual, addressed to program managers,…

This report describes Project OASIS (Older Adults Sharing Important Skills), a project designed to provide paraprofessional mental health services to nursing home residents by providing training for older adult volunteers in areas related to mental health and the elderly, supervision by OASIS staff, and consultation by staff. The background of the…

In order to identify important clinical questions in long-term care settings for older adults, it may be helpful to examine the psychological consultant's role in these settings. A consultant is often faced with some staff members who think he has all the answers and by others who think he has none. The consultant may also encounter a strong…

This report of the findings of a survey of a sample of 1,073 resident institutions which provide nursing or personal care to the aged or chronically ill emphasizes employee work experience, special training, and wages. The median total experience for all nursing and professional employees in the type of job held at the time of the survey was 4.1…