INTERDISCIPLINARY DEMENTIA CARE WORKFORCE TRAINING AND QI IMPLEMENTATION: LEARNINGS FROM 25 HOSPICES

Abstract

Abstract To build and sustain a dementia-capable clinical workforce and care delivery organizations, it is essential to systematically disseminate evidence-based, interdisciplinary dementia care programs. The outbreak of COVID-19, clinical staff shortages, and competing priorities experienced by healthcare organizations including staff vaccination and other regulatory requirements, pose significant challenges to the continuation of agency-wide, interdisciplinary dementia care workforce training and quality improvement. In this symposium, we present our experience Implementing Aliviado Dementia Care, a comprehensive, interdisciplinary dementia care workforce training and quality improvement program amid COVID-19 across 25 U.S. hospice agencies, as part of an embedded pragmatic clinical trial. Aliviado Dementia Care consists of interdisciplinary dementia care workforce training, treatment algorithms, assessments, care plans, caregiver education, and clinical workflow changes. The symposium begins with a discussion of the training, knowledge improvement, turnover, and replenishing strategies of hospice champions during COVID-19. We then discuss how we tailored dementia care training for each of the skilled hospice disciplines (i.e., medicine, nursing, social work, spiritual care) and provide two case studies elucidating how additional tailoring was performed to fit local agency culture and needs during COVID-19. Furthermore, we discuss how we developed and iterated training for home health/hospice aides, the usability and training results, and specific considerations for training aides during COVID-19. Lastly, we conclude the symposium with a discussion of salient strategies and technologies that help sustain our nationwide implementation despite the ongoing COVID-19. Throughout each of these abstracts we also discuss how COVID-19 affected, and created differential implementation of components of the intervention.