The effectiveness of Residents Transfer Communication Programs in enhancing residents$ continuity of care in nursing home

Nursing home (NH) is a place for residents to “nurture their health”. Transitional care between nursing home and emergency department is critical to the continuity of care in the nurturing of their health. This fact however is not widely known and well established in Taiwan. The overall purpose of this research is to evaluate the effectiveness of Residents Transfer Communication Programs tailored for nursing home residents in increasing the quality of continual care via the usage of a multi-method research design. The first year will include a qualitative research design to gain a prior notion of the transfer experience from residents, family member and medical staffs (nurse and physicians) in nursing home and acute- care hospital. Verbatim transcripts of audio-taped interviews will be analyzed by thematic analysis via ATLAS.ti software. In the second year, instruments to measure transfer information and residents transfer needs instrument will be developed based on the data in first year. Delphi and a retrospective chart review of nursing home residents will be conducted by the random selection of nursing home and its transferred hospital to test the validity in the late six months of second year. In the first-half of the third year, the Residents Transfer Communication Program (RTCP) will be developed and validated. A longitudinal quasi-experiment research design will then be applied to evaluate the effectiveness of the program on continuity care quality (health) over time (pre-transfer, transfer point, 1 month and 3 months after transfer point) in the rest of the third year. Both experiment and control group will be present. The participants’ in the experiment group will however undergo Residents Transfer Communication Programs. The control group will only receive regular NH transfer program. The variables will include residents’health, care quality and both nurses and family’s satisfaction of transfer. The sample size will be 250 in each group. Generalized estimated equations (GEE) analysis will be used to understand the long-term effect of each health variable. Findings of this study can provide guidelines for the development of intervention programs for enhancing continuity care quality in the nursing homes in Taiwan.

Project ID:PC10202-0378
External Project ID:NSC101-2314-B182-032-MY3