Best Practices Learning Program
The Program for learning best practices in family care for the elderly brings together scholars to share their observations of best practices from the diverse and changing fields of practice. While assessing evidence, feasibility, and costs of these practices models, the Program will also bring together leaders of service industries and government agencies to seek methods and resources necessary for scaling up some of the best practices in order to improve a community’s or a society’s overall capacity for supporting family care.
The Program will support a learning network to perform systematic, empirical assessments of practice models. Specific tasks include:
- Building databases of exemplary practice in providing solutions to family care service challenges
- Developing a conceptual framework for understanding multiple dimensions of family care in a variety of social, cultural, and clinical contexts
- Developing consensus on culturally sensitive standards/criteria for evaluating best practice of family care for elders
- Organizing forums and work groups to focus on the development of specific implementation and dissemination plans and strategies
Family Care and Humanistic Education
This initiative is aimed to promote the quality of family care through a learning program that emphasizes humanistic values, perspectives, and skills needed for the improvement of family care.
Specific tasks include:
- Organizing a multi-disciplinary forum to assess issues of family care for the elderly from humanistic perspectives, particularly in relation to basic human concerns, such as quality of life in old age, dignity, ability to learn, grow, love, and to find meaning for one's existence as a care recipient
- Understanding and assessing critical qualities and experiences of caregivers such as compassion, patience, endurance, sincerity, and also often negative experiences and moral conflicts that are common to family caregivers including guilt, anger, blame, depression, and anxiety
- Developing curriculum to improve cognitive and humanistic skills for health care professionals to deliver humanistic care to patients and families
- Identifying effective and culturally appropriate ways to improve humanistic skills and values in family caregivers or care workers
Improving Home-based Dementia Care
This initiative is aimed to improve care for persons with dementia through implementing evidence-based intervention strategies in home settings that are culturally and socially different from where the interventions were originally developed. Specific tasks include:
- Organizing international meetings to share ideas and experience of effective ways adapt and implement evidence-based intervention strategies in different countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, China, and the United States where our collaborators have led relevant projects
- Understanding how innovative intervention programs are integrated or interacting with the existing service systems in the community, thus increasing its chance for success and sustainability