MDS Coordinator Relationships and Nursing Home Care Processes

The purpose of this study was to describe how Minimum Data Set (MDS) Coordinators' relationship patterns influence nursing home care processes. The MDS Coordinator potentially interacts with staff across the nursing home to coordinate care processes of resident assessment and care planning. We know little about how MDS Coordinators enact this role or to what extent they may influence particular care processes beyond paper compliance. Guided by complexity science and using two nursing home case studies as examples (pseudonyms Sweet Dell and Safe Harbor), we describe MDS Coordinators' relationship patterns by assessing the extent to which they used and fostered the relationship parameters of good connections, new information flow, and cognitive diversity in their work. Sweet Dell MDS Coordinators fostered new information flow, good connections, and cognitive diversity, which positively influenced assessment and care planning. In contrast, Safe Harbor MDS Coordinators did little to foster good connections, information flow, or cognitive diversity with little influence on care processes. This study revealed that MDS Coordinators are an important new source of capacity for the nursing home industry to improve quality of care. Findings suggest ways to enhance this capacity

Staff perceptions of staff-family interactions in nursing homes

Each year thousands of older adults are admitted to nursing homes. Following admission, nursing home staff and family members must interact and communicate with each other. This study examined relationship and communication patterns between nursing home staff members and family members of nursing home residents, as part of a larger multi-method comparative case study. Here, we report on 6- month case studies of two nursing homes where in-depth interviews, shadowing experiences, and direct observations were completed. Staff members from both nursing homes described staff-family interactions as difficult, problematic and time consuming, yet identified strategies that when implemented consistently, influenced the staff-family interaction positively. Findings suggest explanatory processes in staff-family interactions, while pointing toward promising interventions

Barriers to and Facilitators of Clinical Practice Guideline Use in Nursing Homes

To identify barriers to and facilitators of the diffusion of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) and clinical protocols in nursing homes (NHs)

Neoliberalism with a community face?:A critical analysis of asset-based community development in Scotland

In this article, we trace the ideological and social policy roots of asset-based community development (ABCD) in the United States and the United Kingdom, and explore how this approach has been legitimized in Scotland. We argue that ABCD is a capitulation to neoliberal values of individualization and privatization. Drawing on findings from our empirical work, we discuss how ABCD generates dilemmas for community development. Although some practitioners are able to adapt ABCD to focus on renewing Scottish democracy, several practitioners are using ABCD to privatize public issues such as inequality and justify dramatic cuts to the Scottish welfare state

Linkage Disequilibrium at the Angelman Syndrome Gene UBE3A in Autism Families

Autistic disorder is a neurodevelopmental disorder with a complex genetic etiology. Observations of maternal duplications affecting chromosome 15q11–q13 in patients with autism and evidence for linkage and linkage disequilibrium to markers in this region in chromosomally normal autism families indicate the existence of a susceptibility locus. We have screened the families of the Collaborative Linkage Study of Autism for several markers spanning a candidate region covering ∼2 Mb and including the Angelman syndrome gene (UBE3A) and a cluster of γ-aminobutyric acid (GABAA) receptor subunit genes (GABRB3, GABRA5, and GABRG3). We found significant evidence for linkage disequilibrium at marker D15S122, located at the 5′ end of UBE3A. This is the first report, to our knowledge, of linkage disequilibrium at UBE3A in autism families. Characterization of null alleles detected at D15S822 in the course of genetic studies of this region showed a small (∼5-kb) genomic deletion, which was present at somewhat higher frequencies in autism families than in controls