Author: karendonelan

Karen Donelan, ScD, EdM is the Director and Principal Investigator of the Health Teams for Frail Older Adults project at the Mongan Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital. A health survey and health services researcher, Dr. Donelan has been studying the health system for 3 decades, with special interest in the key relationships among patients, family and informal caregivers, and health professionals. Dr. Donelan is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and holds degrees in health policy from the Harvard School of Public Health and in education from Harvard Graduate School of Education.

New Special Issue of Health Affairs: Community Care for High-Need Patients Released June 4, 2019

We are pleased to have our work included in a new special issue of Health Affairs!

The June 2019 issue of Health Affairs examines the increasing challenge of developing community approaches to caring for people with serious illness and the frailties of aging. This special issue devoted to understanding how we can recruit, train and deploy the necessary clinical and non-clinical workforce and fully integrate family caregivers into care processes. A briefing of the issue was held on June 4th in Washington DC.

Our first paper was presented at the briefing by Karen Donelan: Care Management For Older Adults: The Roles of Nurses, Social Workers, and Physicians
Authors: Karen Donelan, Yuchiao Chang, Julie Berrett-Abebe, Joanne Spetz, David Auerbach, Linda Norman and Peter Buerhaus.

Health Affairs
(Image Credit: Health Affairs)

Our colleague Joanne Spetz also has an article in this issue: Home And Community-Based Workforce For Patients With Serious Illness Requires Support To Meet Growing Needs
Authors: Joanne Spetz, Robyn Stone, Susan Chapman, and Natasha Bryant

Drawing from the 2018 survey we conducted with clinicians in primary care and geriatric practices, we focus on professional staff roles in care management, care coordination and social issues assessment.  Key takeaways:

  1. Many practices do not employ registered nurse and social worker professionals.
  2.  When both RN and SW are present, care coordination and assessment of social issues work shifts to those professionals, and physician time in these activities decreases
  3.  Further research is needed to understand how to build effective and efficient teams in these areas, and how to assure that community primary care practices have adequate staffing

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Journal of the American Geriatrics Society Special Issue on the Workforce for Seriously Ill Frail Older Adults in the Community

A new special issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society presents seven papers commissioned to promote discussion of concrete recommendations from a Workforce Summit convened in Napa in May 2018 that we attended, sponsored by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Joanne Spetz, conference convener and member of our Health Teams for Frail Older Adults project, shares the summary of recommendations in an issue that discusses how to best ensure an adequate workforce for individuals with serious illness in the community. Steve Bartels, new director of the MGH Mongan Institute, also has work included in the issue with his colleague from the Dartmouth Centers for Health and Aging titled Addressing the Community-Based Geriatric Healthcare Workforce Shortage by Leveraging the Potential of Interprofessional Teams. Check out the issue online, and a previous blog by Joanne in Health Affairs sharing recommendations from the summit.