Certified nursing assistant Marie Lee, left, and Kirkhaven resident Evelyn Begert play with a tetherball on Wednesday. Lee was learning how residents can use "simple pleasure items" at the nursing home.
Learning from each other
UR School
of
Nursing students, Kirkhaven staff working together
by Lauren Stanworth
Staff Writer - Democrat and Chronicle
Saturday,
Sept. 10, 2005
The University of Rochester School of Nursing is one of only two institutions
in the country trying out a federal program that brings the college teaching
experience to a nursing home.
The program, called the Teaching Nursing Home model, brings certified
nursing assistants who work in nursing homes together with graduate nursing
and social work students to come up with ideas about how to give the best
care — instead of having those edicts coming down from administrators.
Kirkhaven in Rochester will be the nursing home partnering with UR.
The federal government funded such a program in the 1980s, but it is testing
its usefulness again. The UR School of Nursing competed against a handful
of institutions in the Northeast for the job.
"It's like a dream come true for us," said Nancy Watson, director
of the Center for Clinical Research on Aging at the UR School of Nursing.
Nursing assistants — the staff members who work most closely with
nursing home residents each day — will meet with UR faculty and
four graduate students this semester to discuss what changes they would
like to make in the assistants' workdays and how to go about implementing
them. The two nursing students and two social work students, who come
from a collaborative project between the State University College at Brockport
and Nazareth College, will also shadow nursing assistants at Kirkhaven
to get a real feel for the job.
The program is vastly different from the work that graduate students do
when assigned to a nursing home. In those cases, the students are interns
there to learn. With the Teaching Nursing Home program, the students and
nursing assistants learn together.
Nursing assistants might come up with such ideas as eliminating the impersonal
trays that residents eat on and teaching nursing assistants to better
recognize when a resident is in pain.
"We're very interested in thinking through how we can use this model
to improve care and also to strengthen the curriculum of academic health
professions," said Mathy Mezey, a professor at New York University's
College of Nursing and director of the Hartford Institute of Geriatric
Nursing, the foundation that is handling the federal grant.
The grant is for $20,000, which mostly goes toward a staff member recording
the program's results. Watson hopes UR's work will prove the program should
be expanded to other universities during the next school year.
LSTANFOR@DemocratandChronicle.com