1.5 million grant for improving nursing home care
Press release 19 December 2011
To improve elderly care in nursing homes, a research group led by Maastricht professor Jan Hamers was awarded a €750,000 grant by ZonMw. Regional partners and UM will also contribute to bring the total to nearly €1.5 million for the next five years. The project focuses primarily on the role of nurses in nursing homes and aims to enhance the efficiency and evidence-based nature of their work and improve their expertise and leadership qualities. The results of ‘Nurses on the Move: towards higher quality care in nursing homes’ will be implemented on a regional, national and international level.
Due to an ageing population and the increasingly later age at which people move to nursing homes, the demand for complex nursing home care is expected to increase significantly in the coming decades. Nurses are at the heart of this 24/7 care. Their work largely determines the quality of life, the health and the daily functioning of nursing home residents. The project consists of three interrelated subprojects to which three PhD candidates have been appointed under the supervision of a team of researchers.
Three subprojects
The first project focuses on the many health problems that nursing home residents suffer from, which range from malnutrition and behavioural problems to pressure sores and falls. This project will develop an integrated approach to address all of these healthcare issues simultaneously instead of the fragmented approach to individual problems that is currently being used. This approach will encourage movement in the form of everyday activities in order to maintain and enhance the level of independence in elderly people. The second project aims at finding solutions to the problem of translating scientific knowledge into healthcare practices. The main obstacle is that most healthcare practitioners in nursing homes are not academically qualified to apply this knowledge. The third project will focus on increasing the expertise of healthcare providers. Previous research has shown that the quality of life in nursing homes is closely related to the academic level of healthcare practitioners, and that the deployment of more registered nurses instead of caregivers leads to better outcomes. By reintroducing nurses as leaders who fulfil an inspirational role in the workplace and are able to convey scientific knowledge, the quality of elderly care in nursing homes can be improved.
Partners
The regional partners participating in this project are: Cicero Zorggroep, MeanderGroep Zuid-Limburg, Orbis Medisch en Zorgconcern, Sevagram, Vivre, and Hogeschool Zuyd. A national advisory committee has been appointed to oversee the implementation of the research results throughout the Netherlands. The committee consists of representatives from the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, the Healthcare Inspectorate, the National Organisation for Client’s Councils, the Actiz trade association for healthcare providers, and the V&VN professional association for nurses and caregivers. The project also boasts international collaboration with partners and researchers at New York University.
Praise
Project leader Jan Hamers, Professor of Elderly Care at UM, is delighted with the grant and the esteemed review by the assessment committee. An excerpt from his grant award letter: “The team that is proposed is of outstanding quality and there is unlikely to be a group of researchers in the world that can draw on this many people with this precise range of expertise and demonstrable track-records of precisely the kind of research to be undertaken.” The proposal received the highest possible score from the assessment committee.
ZonMw awards grants on behalf of the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) to promote health research and healthcare innovation.
Note for the press:
For more information on the contents of this press release please contact Professor Jan Hamers, project leader, on 043 388 1549 or by email at jph.hamers@maastrichtuniversity.nl.
The UM Marketing and Communications can be contacted on 043 388 5222, or by email at pers@maastrichtuniversity.nl. For urgent matters outside office hours please call 06 4602 4992.
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