TBRHSC Joins Collaborative to Enhance Care for Seniors

Today, Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre (TBRHSC) announced a new initiative to support elder-friendly care. The TBRHSC team was selected as one of 18 across Canada and internationally invited to join the Acute Care for Elders (ACE) collaborative.

“This is wonderful news for senior patients and their families,” said Dr. Stewart Kennedy, EVP, Medical and Academic Affairs. “As identified in our Strategic Plan 2020, we are focused on enhancing care for an aging population. The ACE Collaborative provides coaching, educational materials and tools to support that. It’s about delivering care based on evidence and best practice for seniors.”

Seniors 65 and older account for 16% of the population, but represent 42% of all acute care hospitalizations and 58% of all hospital days across Canada. Many older adults present to hospital with a number of inter-related chronic and acute health and social issues. Providing evidence-informed care that considers the specific needs of the senior population can improve overall outcomes and reduce lengths of stay, admissions, readmissions and inappropriate resource use.

The ACE Collaborative is adapted from Mount Sinai Hospital’s Acute Care for Elders Strategy. “Our team will have access to expert coaches, including Dr. Samir Sinha and his team who have led the ACE Strategy at Mount Sinai Hospital,” Kennedy said. The ACE collaborative will build the capacity of hospital leaders, front-line managers and providers to better meet the complex needs of acutely ill older adults.

Jean Bartkowiak, TBRHSC President & CEO and CEO, Thunder Bay Regional Research Institute, noted the significance of being selected to join the ACE Collaborative. “Any organization working to improve patient care, health outcomes and coordination of services should ask: ‘What’s out there that works?’ The Acute Care for Elders Collaborative works, and will support our team with implementation, evaluation and spread of proven evidence-informed elder-friendly care practices. While it is our health care practitioners who will receive the best practice education, it is our senior patients who will benefit the most.”

Over the last six years, Mount Sinai Hospital has become Canada’s most widely recognized elder-friendly hospital. Under the banner of the ACE Strategy, it has demonstrated significant improvements in overall quality of care outcomes, as well as reduced lengths of stay, admissions, readmissions and inappropriate resource utilization through the successful implementation of evidence-informed care processes and strategies within the hospital and across the continuum of care.

TBRHSC will receive $40,000 funding to run the program from March 2016 to March 2017. The ACE Collaborative is a partnership between the Canadian Foundation for Healthcare Improvement and the Technology Evaluation in the Elderly Network.

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