The CAPABLE Program: Supporting Aging in Place

Determining what matters to homebound elders.

Sarah Szanton

This month, AJN profiles Sarah Szanton, who created a program known as CAPABLE—Community Aging in Place, Advancing Better Living for Elders—that helps low-income seniors to remain at home with the aid of a unique home care team.

Szanton, an NP who has provided care for homebound elders, notes that “[b]eing in someone’s home gives you the opportunity to see what matters to them.”

The “person–environment fit.”

Szanton’s keen interest in the “person–environment fit” of her frail elderly patients led her to a different perspective on managing illness—one focused less on the “medical model” and more on “function and being able to do what they would like to do.”

In 2008, after the NIH requested proposals for projects to help the newly unemployed, Szanton wondered whether people with home-building skills could be paired with elders to improve their independence and quality of life. And the idea for CAPABLE began to form.

A unique home care team: nurse, occupational therapist, handyman.

CAPABLE’s home care teams are made up of a nurse, an occupational therapist, and a handyman. The patient identifies functional goals such as “to be able to stand long enough to prepare a meal,” and the team devises a plan based on these goals. […]

2017-10-13T10:10:47-04:00October 13th, 2017|Nursing, nursing perspective, patient engagement, Patients|2 Comments
Read More

Easy to Judge Patients for their Choices, Harder to See Them as Individuals

This month’s Reflections essay, “Someone’s Son,” is by Jami Carder, now an RN case manager at the Visiting Nurse Association of Cape Cod. In it, she looks back to a formative nursing experience.

I started my nursing career as a floor nurse. Our patients were complex, and though it seemed we never had enough time or staff, it was important to give them the care they needed and deserved…. [I]t was frustrating to feel that any time was being ‘wasted’…. I remember complaining, at such times, about not being able to take care of my other patients who were ‘really sick.’

By Eric Collins/ecol-art.com.

Who ‘deserves’ care?

Wasted here is meant as code for spending valuable patient care time on patients who are sick because of unhealthy behaviors: in this essay, substance abuse. But we might also then include smoking, overeating, lack of exercise, and so on.

The potential list of unhealthy behaviors is long. And the question of choice is slippery, to say the least. It’s always before us in our personal lives, moment to moment—and by extension, for nurses at the bedside, and in how we as a society think about health care and who ‘deserves’ it. […]

2017-10-11T12:17:07-04:00October 11th, 2017|Nursing|0 Comments
Read More

Are We Hearing the Questions that Patients and Their Families Don’t Ask?

“The spoken and unspoken messages we give patients and families are powerful.”

Viewpoint author Juanita Reigle

As a ‘frequent flyer’ of late, accompanying a family member on the long trek through cancer treatment, I’m acutely aware of the ways in which doctors and nurses communicate with us. Some have never mastered the art of interacting with people in stressful conditions. Others have remarkable radar and a special ability to “read between the lines,” identifying concerns that he and I haven’t yet voiced.

In ‘She’s Fine,’ the Viewpoint essay in AJN’s October issue, Juanita Reigle reflects upon how we respond to the questions patients and family members don’t raise. Some are left unasked because people are too overwhelmed to formulate a question. Some people aren’t ready to hear the answers. And sometimes, sadly, families sense that this doctor or nurse really doesn’t want to engage with them.

[…]

2017-10-09T09:48:08-04:00October 9th, 2017|Nursing, patient experience, Patients|0 Comments
Read More

Thinking About Las Vegas

This latest mass shooting, in which 59 people were killed and 500 wounded in Las Vegas, is distressing—and it won’t be the last. Again we find it incredible that this can be allowed to happen.

And again we are reminded of the unique position of the United States compared to most other countries, our astronomically higher numbers of gunshot deaths and the financial and emotional costs they exact. As I wrote in my February 2016 editorial on gun violence, “firearms accounted for 417,583 deaths—253,638 suicides and 163,945 homicides between 2003–2013.”

There’s more information about gun violence and the dismaying number of injuries and deaths among children in our report in the September issue. And a study just published in Health Affairs puts the annual cost of emergency and inpatient care for firearm injuries at $2.8 billion.

The numbers of deaths and injuries we can measure. The sense of helplessness and frustration, and the creeping sense of anxiety we experience as we go into public spaces, are more invidious. […]

2017-10-07T08:35:43-04:00October 6th, 2017|Nursing, Public health|3 Comments
Read More

Student Errors in the Clinical Setting: Time for Transparency

Mistakes happen.

When I was working as an ED nurse, we often had nursing students assigned to the area. One day we had an elderly man with asthma in one of the treatment rooms. The physician ordered aminophylline suppositories. After reviewing the “5 rights”—right patient, right medication, right dose, right time, right route—I directed the student to administer the suppositories. All seemed well.

Imagine my surprise when the student proceeded to insert the suppository into the man’s nose! She explained that since it was a breathing problem, she naturally thought they would be inserted nasally. It never occurred to her that these were rectal suppositories and it never occurred to me to ask if she knew what to do with them. We all had a good laugh and that was that.

Undocumented errors.

Another day, another patient, another faux pas: a physician said to “cut the IV,” which everyone knew (that is, we assumed everyone knew) meant to discontinue the patient’s IV. One of my colleagues intervened when she saw a determined-looking student, with bandage scissors in hand, approach the patient’s room, ready to “cut the IV.” We again marveled at the student’s interpretation of the phrasing, and that was that.

And that’s the problem—that was that. There was no documentation of these as “near-miss” errors, and while some […]

2017-10-04T09:57:24-04:00October 4th, 2017|Nursing, nursing students, patient safety|2 Comments
Read More

Comment ground rules

1. Please be respectful.
2. We moderate all comments.

Content disclaimer

Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
Go to Top