Lutheran Life Villages Kendallville collaborates with national experts

Lutheran Life Villages in Kendallville has teamed up with researchers at the Scripps Gerontology Center in Ohio and the Center for Quality Aging at Vanderbilt University in an applied research program to improve care and quality of life for residents.

Over the next several months, Lutheran Life Villages, along with 39 other skilled-nursing-care communities across the country, will collaborate with researchers to improve incontinence care for residents, helping to address a chronic problem that has persisted nationally in long-term-care settings, despite repeated efforts to resolve it.

For the project, selected staff members at Lutheran Life Villages will attend monthly teleconferences to learn about new strategies for managing incontinence care. The teleconferences will be led by Dr. John F. Schnelle, director of Vanderbilt’s Center for Quality Aging and one of the nation’s foremost experts on incontinence management in skilled-nursing-care communities.

Between teleconferences, staff members will implement these best practices and provide feedback on the results to the research team. As a collaborative, all participating skilled-nursing-care communities and the researchers will then work to resolve any problems that arise and move on to implement next steps to continuously improve care.

There is growing consensus among long-term-care stakeholders, including researchers, policy makers, skilled-nursing staff, and resident advocates, that practice-based collaborative efforts such as this one are needed to advance skilled-nursing-care quality to the next level.

Lutheran Life Villages in Kendallville has been given a Five-Star rating and is always seeking new ways to improve care for its residents. Participation in this project not only allows Lutheran Life Villages to do that, but also allows it to play at least a small part in improving care for all skilled-nursing-care residents.

The research project extends through July, 2010, but Lutheran Life Villages intends to continue to implement indefinitely the lessons learned from it for the benefit of residents because quality improvement is a continuous process at Lutheran Life Villages.

For more information about this or other services offered by Lutheran Life Villages in Kendallville, contact Barbara Lewis, director of nursing, at (260) 347-2256 or blewis@lutheranlifevillages.org.

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