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You can count on Age-Friendly Health Systems to care for your needs. – Melissa Batchelor (02:04-02:14)

 

Age-friendly Health Systems are systems where people are thinking about you and what your care needs are. In this week’s episode, Melissa Batchelor talks about Age-Friendly Health Systems with her special guest, Dr. Terry Fulmer, the President of the John A. Hartford Foundation. The 4M’s is an initiative to “geriatricize” the workforce by teaching providers to use the 4M’s Framework: What Matters, Medication, Mentation, and Mobility. 

 

Part One of ‘Age-Friendly Health Systems
Interview with Dr. Terry Fulmer’

Dr. Fulmer reports that the Age-Friendly Health Systems are scaling in a way that they couldn’t have imagined. The goal is to have 20% of all hospitals and health systems involved at some level by 2020. They are on target to meet this goal – and Age-Friendly Health Systems are now in all fifty states after only two years. It’s because people understand that they want age-friendly care. They want the kind of care that’s responsive to their needs and that speaks to them.

 

We have created an incredible wealth of content
for anybody who wants to get on the journey with
age-friendly health systems. – Terry Fulmer
(05:35-05:44)

 

Terry sees care where the handoffs are not. She sees what they could be and describes all of their work as evidence-based. They are focused on disease-specific conversations. This is not necessarily the best way to think about older people who have three to five chronic diseases and are managing multiple complex medications.

 

Part Two of ‘Age-Friendly Health Systems
Interview with Dr. Terry Fulmer’

When Dr. Fulmer became President and CEO of the John A. Hartford foundation, she was asked what her significant contribution would be. She wanted to create Age-Friendly Health Systems. Since 2015, it’s something she has been unpacking and organizing a conversation with along with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI).

 

You can’t be an age-friendly community unless you have an age-friendly health system within you, your catchment area. –  Terry Fulmer (10:53-11:00)

 

In partnership with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Dr. Fulmer says they have created an incredible wealth of content for anybody who wants to become an Age-Friendly Health System. If you go to the IHI website, you will find Guidelines that will tell you how to use the 4M’s in practice. There are other resources, too; from How to Make the Business Case to a Return on Investment (ROI) calculator to help you evaluate the program with your own organizational data.

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How to Get Involved: 

If you are interested in becoming an Age-Friendly Health System, the link below takes you to an overview of the program, a recorded informational call (from Feb 24, 2020), a link to enroll in the next round of Action Communities and the data you will need to submit to enroll, and to email AFHS@IHI.org or KellyAnne Pepin directly at KPepin@ihi.org if you have questions. The program and all materials/ resources are FREE to any hospital and/or health system that would like to join this social movement. 

About Melissa:

Dr. Melissa Batchelor earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing (‘96) and Master of Science in Nursing (‘00) as a Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP) from the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) School of Nursing (SON). She worked full-time for five years as FNP in geriatric primary care across many long-term care settings (skilled nursing homes, assisted living, home and office visits) then transitioned into academic nursing in 2005, joining the faculty at UNCW SON as a lecturer. She obtained her PhD in Nursing and a post-Master’s Certificate in Nursing Education from the Medical University of South Carolina College of Nursing (’11) and then joined the faculty at Duke University School of Nursing as an Assistant Professor. Her family moved to northern Virginia in 2015 and led to her joining the faculty at George Washington University (GW) School of Nursing in 2018 as an Associate Professor with tenure where she is also the Director of the GW Center for Aging, Health and Humanities.

Find out more about her work HERE.

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