interprof ACT: Strategies to Promote Physician-Nurse Collaboration in Nursing Homes and Their Effectiveness on Resident Hospital Admissions
Hospital admissions are stressful events for nursing home residents with unclear benefits. In Germany, about 30-60 percent of nursing home residents are hospitalized at least once a year, and up to 40 percent of these admissions are considered avoidable. Building on our exploratory study INTERPROF, we investigate whether selected measures facilitate communication and collaboration between nurses and primary care physicians and reduce hospital admissions of nursing home residents.
"interprof ACT" is a multicenter cluster randomized controlled intervention study with a total of 680 nursing home residents in 34 facilities. Nursing homes are randomly assigned to control and intervention groups. Nursing homes in the control group receive brief information about physician-nurse care. In the intervention group, nursing homes and primary care physicians jointly select suitable measures from the "interprof ACT package" and use them for (at least) one year. The intervention and control groups will be compared with regard to the frequency of hospital admissions of residents, days spent in hospital, other indicators of medical care utilization, prevalence of inadequate medication and quality of life. In addition, the processes of implementation and the associated changes in the nursing homes will be analyzed. A health economic evaluation will be used to examine the costs incurred in both groups. "Interprof ACT" is being carried out jointly with the Chair of Organization and Corporate Development at the Georg August University of Göttingen, the Institute of Medical Statistics at the University Medical Center Göttingen, the Section for Research and Teaching at the University of Lübeck, and the Institute of General Medicine and the Institute of Health Economics and Health Services Research at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. The project is funded by the Innovation Committee at the Federal Joint Committee (FK 01VSF16029).
Project management: Prof. Dr. med. Eva Hummers, Dr. med. Christiane Müller
Funding period: 01.04.2017 - 31.03.2020
Cooperations
- Prof. Dr. Indre Maurer, Professur für Organisation und Unternehmensentwicklung der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
- Prof. Dr. Tim Friede, Institut für Medizinische Statistik der Universitätsmedizin Göttingen
- Prof. Dr. phil. Sascha Koepke, Sektion für Forschung und Lehre der Universität zu Lübeck
- Prof. Dr. med. Martin Scherer, Institut für Allgemeinmedizin des Universitätsklinikums Hamburg-Eppendorf
- Univ.-Prof. Dr. med. Hans-Helmut König, Institut für Gesundheitsökonomie und Versorgungsforschung des Universitätsklinikums Hamburg-Eppendorf
Publications
Contact
contact information
- telephone: +49 551 3968192
- fax: +49 551 3929530
- e-mail address: christiane.mueller(at)med.uni-goettingen.de