Australia & New Zealand
Newsletter
Issue 1
- May 2009
Links
'Talking
the same language
for effective care for
older people'
interRAI Australia
Coordinating Centre
Telephone: +61(7)-32406420
Facsimile: +61(7)-32405399
Email:
interRAI mail
InterRAI
New Zealand
Coordinating Centre
Email:
olderpeople@moh.govt.nz
From the editor
interRAI Australia and New Zealand have
joined forces to prepare this newsletter. Our close proximity and
similar health care settings provide an excellent opportunity to share
information and resources in promoting interRAI activities in each
country.
The
newsletter will be circulated quarterly to people who have signed up to
our mailing lists. We will report important developments and events. The
content is being assembled by interRAI Fellows Brigette Larkins, Nigel
Millar and myself, supported by Nadine Krueger in our Brisbane office.
If you have news you would like to share, please contact
Nadine
Krueger.
An
important forthcoming event is the next interRAI CONFERENCE, to be
conducted in Brisbane on May 3 and 4, 2010. There will be a large
contingent of international speakers from interRAI nations around the
world. Further details will be circulated in the next few months. I
hope to see you there.
Len Gray
Editor
Headlines
>>
Major interRAI conference planned
for 2010 in Brisbane, Australia
>>
Home
Care Plans for NZ – The National Implementation Project
>>
interRAI
Acute Care use expands in Queensland
>>
New
Zealand interRAI
Methodology User Group
>>
Reliability of an "Online" Geriatric Assessment Procedure, Australia
>>
Australian study to develop Quality Indicators for interRAI Acute Care
>>
The joint ACC and DHB project, New Zealand
>>
Funding success – interRAI
and Dietetics
News
Major interRAI conference planned
for 2010 in Brisbane, Australia
interRAI Australia will host a major regional interRAI conference in
Brisbane on May 3rd and 4th, 2010. Although only in its early planning
stages, the meeting will feature numerous international speakers from
Europe and North America. There will be a regional focus, with the
program configured to reflect developments and research in Australia,
New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong. The meeting is scheduled
immediately prior to the Annual Scientific Meeting of the Australian &
New Zealand Society for Geriatric Medicine, to be held in Coolum, just
outside of Brisbane, on May 5 -7.
Mark this in your diaries!
Home Care Plans for NZ – The
National
Implementation Project
The interRAI National Implementation Project is nearing the end of the
first stage of development. The project led by the Ministry of Health is
a phased 4 year implementation of the interRAI Minimum Data Set Home
Care 2.0 (MDS-HC) and Contact Assessment (CA) to improve assessment
processes for older people in New Zealand.
Upon completion, the twenty one District Health Boards (DHBs) will use
the assessments primarily for people over 65 years who require needs
assessment for access to long term publicly funded services in the home
or for residential care. DHBs may use the Contact and/or Home Care
assessments within their individual service delivery model to assess
client’s needs. This includes use of interRAI methodology such as CAPs
and outcome scales to inform the clients care plan. In this way
different DHBs have flexibility to meet their service delivery needs in
individual ways yet have the benefit of standardised assessment results
to equitably support clients in their district. The Information
Communication Technology aspect of the plan also attends to future
capability to collect and use aggregated data to inform local and
national planning.
The implementation plan includes a funding model that supports
collaboration among DHBs and focuses on operational as well as capital
requirements. The plan also provides National Criteria regarding: use of
interRAI in New Zealand, Training and Workforce, Maori Access,
Information Communication Technology and Post-implementation management.
To date six DHBs are using interRAI at the minimum requirement for
support needs assessment. It is likely that DHBs will also use the
assessments for wider purposes.
For comment or questions about the interRAI project please contact the
Project Manager on +64 3 372 3042 or 027 212 7308, or by emailing
olderpeople@moh.govt.nz.
interRAI
Acute Care use expands in Queensland
The
interRAI AC is now in regular use in 6 hospitals in Queensland
Australia. It is primarily used to support geriatric consultation but
in some settings it also supports geriatric and rehabilitation ward based
care. A novel use is the ability to conduct geriatric assessment
“online” whereby geriatricians are able to view and report assessments
via the internet which have been prepared by nurse assessors. This
system is planned for rollout to up to 30 hospitals in the next 12
months.
More details can be found in this publication: Gray L, Wootton R
(2008).
Comprehensive geriatric assessment “online”.
Australasian Journal on Ageing 27(4):205-208.
New Zealand interRAI Methodology User
Group - from small beginnings to increasing capability for collegial
support
Following several years of activity, New Zealand adopted the use of
interRAI Home Care and Contact assessment tools with the announcement in
July 2008 of Ministry of Health funding to support a nation wide
implementation over the next three to four years. Prior to this, five
District Health Boards (DHBs) were involved in a two year pilot
investigating the use of the home care assessment tool. To support the
assessors involved in that pilot, an informal ‘user group’ was
established to help assessors share experiences and provide collegial
support for each other. The assessors met via a teleconference and
continued to meet to discuss interRAI well after the actual pilot had
officially finished.
That ‘user group’ has now been firmly established as the New Zealand
interRAI Methodology User Group and now comes under the auspices of
Dr Nigel Millar the New Zealand interRAI fellow who appoints a new chair
on a regular basis.
Nigel Millar says, “the group is an open forum for anyone with an
interest in interRAI in New Zealand. I am very pleased with the
collegial support and effort that people are investing in interRAI and
this forum is a good example of that. I would recommend that anyone with
an interest become part of the group, and that includes anyone from
Australia too!”.
The terms of reference and contact details for the forum are available
from
olderpeople@moh.govt.nz.
>> back to top
Reliability
of an "Online" Geriatric Assessment Procedure (Australia)
The Academic Unit in Geriatric Medicine at the University of Queensland
has been awarded a National Health and Medical Research Grant to conduct
a study to examine the reliability of an "Online" Geriatric Assessment
Procedure. The online assessment is built around the interRAI AC, and
can be used to support geriatric consultation or ward based care in city
and rural settings.
This program will examine the reliability, safety and cost of providing
"Online" Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment to older people in hospital,
compared to live assessments. Three sites and 10 geriatricians across
Australia will be involved. For further information contact
Len Gray.
Australian study to develop Quality Indicators for interRAI Acute Care
The Academic Unit in Geriatric Medicine at the University of Queensland,
Australia recently was awarded a significant research grant to develop a
suite of Quality Indicators for care of the frail elderly in acute
care. The QIs will be derived from the interRAI Acute Care MDS. The
study will involve at least 10 hospitals across 2 states. The ACOVE-3
process indicators will also be collected as part of the project. The
project involves interRAI members Len Gray and John Morris, who will be
assisted by Rich Jones from HSL, Boston. International members wishing
to be involved in this work can contact
Melinda Martin-Khan.
The joint Accident Compensation
Corporation (ACC), New Zealand District Health Board (DHB) interRAI
pilot project
ACC provides
comprehensive, no-fault personal injury for all New Zealand residents
and visitors to New Zealand. ACC works closely with businesses and the
community to make New Zealand a safer place and ensure all New
Zealanders have equal access to the ACC Scheme.
ACC and local DHBs are trialling the joint use of the interRAI
assessment tool, which looks at all a client’s home-based care needs in
one go. This single assessment will review a client’s combined injury
and non-injury needs to help establish the home-based services needed to
meet them. This will ideally result in delivering coordinated services
though one organisation, either ACC or the client’s local DHB.
The services provided share a common goal of assisting a person who is
aging or has a disability and/or injury arising from an accident to
remain part of their community.
ACC wishes to discover if:
• only one assessment can be used to identify all the
support services required by a client,
• there is greater clarity of funding responsibility
for agencies jointly providing home based support
• there is a reduction in overall cost to ACC
ACC is currently working with the Capital & Coast DHB in Wellington and
the Nelson & Marlborough DHB in Nelson. Once full approval to begin the
pilot occurs then clients who meet the criteria for inclusion in the
pilot will be asked to participate. It is estimated that 400 clients
will participate in the pilot.
Funding success – interRAI and Dietetics
Researchers from Operational Support Services (Nutrition and Dietetics)
and the Academic Unit in Geriatric Medicine (AUGM) at the Princess
Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane (Australia) have recently obtained a
$10,000 Health Practitioner Research Grant from Queensland Health to
complete collaborative research using the interRAI-Acute Care (AC)
assessment instrument. It will augment the significant research program
at AUGM examining the process and quality of care of the frail aged in
the acute care setting.
The project is investigating new approaches to dietetic assessment as
part of a comprehensive geriatric assessment. It is practice-based, as
the interRAI-AC is used in acute care and rehabilitation as standard
practice at several Queensland Health facilities for comprehensive
geriatric assessment. The validity of interRAI-AC questions for
nutritional status will be tested against standard dietetics tools. Once
this is achieved, it could be used, in practice, to: (i) streamline
nutrition screening and assessment processes currently conducted by
Nutrition Assistants and Dieticians, (ii) improve the early
identification and treatment of malnutrition in older adult inpatients
on admission to acute and rehabilitation settings and (iii) reduce the
prevalence of this chronic and preventable disease. Effective and timely
recognition of malnutrition risk and malnutrition status is essential to
reduce its detrimental effects on patient mortality and morbidity, and
hospital costs due to longer recovery times and extended hospital stays.
For further information contact
Olivia Wright.
>> back to top
New
vendors
Australia: Coordimax – Licensed the iHC and iPAC
>> back to top
Recent publications
Berg, K., H. Finne-Soveri, et al. (2009).
"Relationship
between interRAI HC and the ICF: opportunity for operationalizing the
ICF."
BMC Health Services Research 9(1): 47.
Gray, L. C., K. Berg, et al. (2009).
"Sharing clinical information across care settings: the birth of an
integrated assessment system." BMC Health Serv Res 9(1): 71.
Gray, L. and R. Wootton (2008).
"Comprehensive
geriatric assessment “online”."
Australasian Journal on Ageing 27(4): 205-208.
>> back to top
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