IFAS Research Looks to the Future

Posted: Mar. 21, 2008
return to IFAS Age Newletter March 2008

The word "researcher" may bring to mind a picture of that "nerd" in your high school biology class who spent most of his time alone with his books and his microscope. Fortunately, that image doesn't fit the group of applied researchers who work for AAHSA's nine-year-old Institute for the Future of Aging Services (IFAS).

For one thing, IFAS researchers are dedicated women who came to AAHSA after working in government, academia and aging organizations. And, unlike that nerd from your past, our researchers are more likely to be found interacting with caregivers and residents than sitting alone at their desks. Because IFAS staffers conduct applied research, they spend their days facilitating focus groups with frontline nursing home staff, advising facility administrators about the efficacy of a particular care model, interviewing housing providers about ways to successfully bring services to their buildings or conducting workshops about what they've discovered.

"We created IFAS to give researchers the opportunity to learn about real world practice so they could understand what works and what doesn't work," says IFAS Executive Director Dr. Robyn Stone. "Our focus is on the future of quality, the future of the workforce and the future of housing. We're striving all the time to learn from today so we can help build models for the future."

Concrete Benefits

IFAS carries out many of its projects in partnership with AAHSA members who suggest research topics, help IFAS garner financial support for projects or agree to serve as pilot sites for IFAS studies. It can take several years for IFAS to move from an initial idea to a funded project, and obtaining funding from outside sources is often the institute's most challenging task. However, once projects are up and running, IFAS works hard to ensure that AAHSA members gain a number of concrete benefits from them.

For example, organizations that serve as pilot sites for IFAS projects often receive invaluable guidance about how they can improve their services. Providers who participated in the institute's five-year Better Jobs Better Care Initiative got the help they needed to test new ways of recruiting and retaining direct care workers. Likewise, participants in the 2002 evaluation of Wellspring Innovative Solutions received timely feedback about how effective this quality improvement model was and how it could be improved.

"Basically, we gave them free management consulting about how to engage in better quality improvement," says Stone about the Wellspring participants. "We do our best to feed real-time information back to providers so they can build their skills."

Of course, AAHSA members not directly involved in IFAS projects also benefit from the institute's research when they attend workshops at state and national conferences or read project reports available on the IFAS Web site. Any provider reading the 2007 IFAS report on Connecting Senior Housing and Services, for example, will find detailed descriptions of several approaches to helping older people age in place.

"You can read that report and see how three properties in Denver were able to do this and you could easily learn the principles that guided them," says Stone. "They each had a different philosophy and they each approached it differently. But they were all successful."

On Tap for 2008

Most IFAS research projects focus on three major areas of study, all of which were selected during an extensive strategic planning process: (1) developing a quality workforce, (2) expanding affordable housing plus services and (3) promoting nursing home quality improvement.

"We tend to be with the same issues for quite a long time because we are trying to move the field and you can't do that in just a couple of years," says Stone.

Stone points to three projects that have IFAs researchers excited this year:

• Workforce cabinet: A broad-based working group will meet for the next two years to explore workforce issues and help IFAS develop an applied research agenda around these issues.
• Disability screening tool: IFAS will be working for the first time with the National Institute on Aging to translate into practice a screening tool that can predict an older person's risk of developing a disability.
• International workforce issues: IFAS will launch its first European study this year when it teams up with the International Association of Homes and Services for the Aging to conduct a cross-national study of workforce issues in several countries. The project is being funded by the Invacare Corporation.