Palliative Care in Your Nursing Home: Program Development and Innovation in Transitional Care

Each year in the United States, 31% of elders who die do so in hospitals, accounting for over half a million deaths often involving expensive and unnecessary treatments (Zhao & Encinosa, 2010 ). Re-hospitalizations of frail elders with end-stage illnesses are a concern for the hospitals that have discharged them and for the facilities in which they live. In 2011, Schervier Nursing Care Center, a 364-bed skilled nursing and rehabilitation facility in the Bronx, NY, looked at its re-hospitalization rates. It was discovered that a large percentage of the residents being sent to the hospital were from the long-term and subacute populations with end-stage diseases that were no longer responding to treatment. This article describes the development of two innovative programs whose goals were to increase the number of residents receiving palliative care, increase the number of completed advance directives, reduce re-hospitalizations, and increase hospital referrals to the nursing home for palliative care. The key components of both programs and their outcomes are described. The development and implementation of these programs were the author's capstone project for the Zelda Foster Social Work Leadership Fellowship in Palliative and End-of-Life Care.