Development and Delivery of Enhanced Implementation Support to Disseminate a National Caregiver Skills Training...

Area of Science:

• Implementation Science
• Healthcare Management
• Gerontology

Background:

• Growing aging population necessitates effective caregiver training programs.
• Challenges exist in providing implementation support for diverse sites in large-scale initiatives.
• External group-based facilitation is a potential approach for scalable support.

Purpose of the Study:

• To detail the development and delivery of a pragmatic implementation facilitation approach.
• To support the national rollout of the Caregivers FIRST caregiver training program.
• To evaluate this approach across over 140 Veterans Health Administration (VHA) sites.

Main Methods:

• Described the development and delivery of enhanced support to 13 VHA sites.
• Utilized administrative, survey, and project data for analysis.
• Employed 4 group-based calls over 12 weeks with tailored external facilitation.

Main Results:

• Enhanced support addressed key barriers: caregiver recruitment/retention, competing demands, and inter-departmental support.
• Perceived helpfulness of enhanced support increased from 3.4 at 6 months to 4.2 at 12 months.
• Sites valued collaborative problem-solving and learning best practices from peers.

Conclusions:

• The described group-based external facilitation approach can guide large-scale dissemination of caregiver interventions.
• This model offers valuable insights for other healthcare systems implementing similar programs.
• Successful implementation support is crucial for widespread adoption of caregiver training.