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Preparing Long-Term Care Staff to Meet the Needs of Aging Persons With Serious Mental Illness
Anjana Muralidharan1, Whitney L Mills2, Denise R Evans3
1VA Capitol Healthcare Network, Mental Illness Research Education and Clinical Center, Baltimore, MD; Department of Psychiatry, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD.
Objectives:
Individuals with serious mental illness (SMI; schizophrenia spectrum disorders and affective psychoses) are increasingly aging into older adulthood and are overrepresented in residential long-term care settings. The present study aimed to examine the preparedness of staff in these settings to care for individuals with SMI.
Design:
A multidisciplinary US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) workgroup of professionals with expertise in geriatric mental health collected voluntary feedback via online questionnaire as part of a quality improvement project.
Setting And Participants:
Respondents were mental health providers (N=51) embedded in VA nursing homes called Community Living Centers (CLCs).
Measures:
The questionnaire contained multiple-choice, Likert-type scale, and open-ended questions regarding the opportunities and challenges associated with caring for Veterans with SMI in CLCs.
Results:
Respondents identified a lack of training of front-line staff as a key challenge in providing high-quality care to residents with SMI. Specifically, respondents indicated a need to increase staff knowledge about SMI symptoms and diagnoses, to improve staff communication and interactions with residents with SMI, and to decrease mental illness stigma among staff.
Conclusions/Implications:
The present study revealed significant areas of training need for front-line staff in nursing homes. Many perceived staff training needs overlap with the knowledge and skill set required to provide high-quality dementia care. Integrating training regarding the care of residents with SMI into dementia care training efforts may be a fruitful future direction. Strategies for this and a suggested curriculum are provided.
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