Training: An Essential Element of Effective Team Care

At Archstone Foundation, we believe that health care, social services, and related systems can and should work together to provide quality care for older people. By quality care, we mean care that is Culturally competent, Client-centered, Comprehensive, Collaborative, Coordinated, Connected, and Compassionate; we refer to this as the Seven Cs of Care (Seven Cs).

This is in keeping with the Foundation’s mission, to improve the health and well-being of older Californians and their caregivers.

Through our new strategic planning work, we identified long-standing systemic failures and the lack of coordination between health care and social services as fundamental challenges to comprehensive, coordinated care and achieving our mission. To address these challenges, as our President and CEO, Christopher A. Langston, explained in his blog post announcing the strategic plan, Archstone Foundation seeks to meet our mission through the integration of health and social services.

We will strive to accomplish this by shifting our grantmaking away from distinct issue areas to three new core strategies we’re calling the Three Ts: Teams, Training and Technology.

This is the third in a series of four blog posts. In addition to the announcement of our new strategic plan, my colleague Jasmine Lacsamana previously explained why we chose Teams as one of our Three Ts and what we aim to fund. This post will take a closer look at why Training is critical to team care that embodies the Seven Cs, and what we are looking to fund.

Training: Critical to Better Team Care

Integrated care requires a commitment to changing long-established policies and practices needed to address the complex care needs of older people. Simply put, effective team care requires training. Social services and health care cannot collaborate effectively without learning from and about each other, the formal processes of teamwork, and client-centered care.

With its Training priority area, Archstone Foundation will center its grantmaking on training health care and social service providers, professionals, and paraprofessionals on effective, evidence-based team care models, with a focus on improving teamwork and enhancing the expertise and skills needed to provide quality care for older adults.

We also will look for opportunities to ensure that newer team members—such as Community Health Workers (CHWs) and promotores de salud (the Spanish term for CHWs), who are taking on more care coordination and navigation responsibilities to fill gaps in traditional care—receive appropriate training for those new roles and responsibilities.

Training should also help to develop the capacity of team members to address issues of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, an essential component of providing care that meets older adults’ needs holistically and links to the Seven Cs.

In addition, Archstone Foundation will draw on our emerging learning in models of team care to support the translation of that knowledge into training programs for current practitioners in health care and social services to provide better care.

Our Future Grantmaking

Providing training based on evidence from successful models such as Care Partners, PACE, forensic teams, and those that Archstone Foundation will develop (as well as the essential skills for person-centered care, such as goal elicitation and motivational interviewing) can significantly advance the availability of integrated, person-centered team care.

A recent grant to Partners in Care Foundation (Partners) to redesign and scale a highly effective training curriculum for CHWs offers a nice example of a grant that expands upon Partners’ existing work and targets the integration of health care and social services. The training prepares CHWs to work in community-based organizations, physician offices, and other settings serving older adults, and is being developed using an existing curriculum created and previously pilot-tested in partnership with Blue Shield California.

The new training will be designed and delivered in collaboration with Los Angeles Valley College, which will use its government workforce development funding to provide free training to students. This training will build capacity for an integrated health and social care system to ensure older people who are chronically ill and frail are at the core of that integration, and that they are being supported to navigate these two systems.

This work also targets a critical workforce gap by training CHWs to serve as effective extenders of the health care team.

Another strong example is our grant to support an Elder Abuse Curriculum for Medical Residents, being developed by the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine in collaboration with University of California, Irvine, University of California, San Francisco, and University of California San Diego.

The universities are working together to develop and implement a standardized elder abuse curriculum for family medicine, internal medicine, emergency medicine, geriatric, and psychiatry residents.

Elder abuse detection and prevention is integral to comprehensive provider treatment. Yet many practitioners lack the expertise to identify elder abuse. This diagnostic gap is due to lack of basic training. Despite the prevailing need, medical schools currently do not have a dedicated standardized curriculum educating their residents in the signs and risk factors of abuse, treatment protocols, and mandatory reporting requirements.

Back to the Future

Archstone Foundation also will leverage our past investments. In fact, our new strategic plan, including the Training priority area, is in accordance with national research previously funded by the Foundation.

In 2007, Archstone Foundation supported the National Academies’ (Institute of Medicine) “Retooling for an Aging America” report that examined the future health care workforce for older Americans, probed into workforce challenges, and created a plan of action to improve the health of the 73 million people from the post-World War II generation who began to turn 65 in January 2011.

Through this work, experts questioned the best use of the paid health care workforce and informal caregivers in meeting the needs of older people. They examined new roles and types of providers necessary to facilitate efficient, high-quality care and considered how the health care workforce should be educated and trained to deliver high-value care to older people.

A more recent National Academies report, “Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care,” also funded by the Foundation, serves as a fundamental part of our new strategic plan. The report calls out the need for integration and to build a skilled workforce capable of integrating social care into the delivery of health care.

It also provides recommendations on how to expand social services, better coordinate roles for social care providers in interprofessional care teams in diverse health settings, and how to optimize the effectiveness of social services to improve health and health care.

Our Success Relies on You

To achieve our mission to improve the health and well-being of older Californians and their caregivers, we need to learn about the training work you are doing to integrate social services and health care.

Our future grantmaking begins with a conversation and a two-page brief. Visit Our New Strategy: Three Ts to learn more about our three core areas and our grantmaking. To learn more about Training or share your training model, reach out to me directly: jfassbinder@archstone.org.

We look forward to hearing from you!