Supporting Older Adults and Caregivers in Transitions Between Health Services: Planning Grant

As we age, we are more likely to face health challenges that require the use of various types of health services including home and community-based services, physician and hospital-based services, and residential housing and care services. Our long-term research plan is to examine strategies that older adults and their caregivers use to navigate between these three types of health services and identifying obstacles that they face in doing this. We want to learn how these strategies and obstacles influence what services are used, how they are accessed and how easy access to services influences quality of life. We will spend a year conducting activities that will help us develop a research proposal. We will first review and summarize research already completed on our topic. This summary will be shared in consultation sessions with older adults and their caregivers, healthcare providers, and policymakers. These people will provide input into what research questions are most urgent to ask and how best to do this research. After receiving and processing this input, our research team will write a research proposal, primarily during a two-day grant writing meeting where we will refine the research questions and methods that we will use, identify how to recruit research participants, create a plan to analyze the data we will collect, develop a timeline for the research, and create a budget. We will mentor undergraduate students and graduate students/postdoctoral fellows as employees and as part of their academic programs. The results of our research will help identity how to help older adults and their caregivers in accessing and navigating appropriate health services. This can help to keep older adults healthier by helping them use the right services at the right time and place, while supporting their transitions from one service to another. This can reduce healthcare costs by reducing the number of admissions and re-admissions to services like hospitals and nursing homes.