1st CCAC/Saint Elizabeth Culture Change Coalition Meeting

Hello from the CCAC/Saint Elizabeth Culture Change Coalition (CCC)!

Please allow me to introduce myself. I am Jennifer Gillies, postdoctoral fellow with MAREP and the PiDC Alliance and co-researcher with the CCAC/Saint Elizabeth CCC. Our Partnership in Dementia Care Alliance (PiDC) blog has just been created (Thanks, Zara!) so I wanted to use this opportunity to fill you in on what happens at our Huron County CCC meetings.

Today was our first CCCAC/Saint Elizabeth Culture Change Coalition meeting. We spent most of the time gettting to know each other. We also learned about the larger project, and collectively created the principles that would guide our participation in the coalition. As you may know, our CCC is one of four research sites in the PiDC alliance, yet is the only community care setting. Our committee consists of 13 members -  various staff members from the South West CCAC and Saint Elizabeth, as well as researchers from MAREP and the PiDC Alliance. In order to ensure we include the perspectives of all major stakeholders in our coalition, we explored options for including persons with dementia and their family members as part of our CCC. At our meeting, the researchers mentioned how we would like to have a sense of the current community care experience in order to measure the impact of our culture change initiative. A survey called the CARE Profile, which measures the care experience for long-term care staff, residents, and their families, was introduced as a tool that may be able to help us measure the care experience throughout our process. Since it was designed to be used in the long-term care context, we discussed how we, as a group, may want to adapt the CARE Profile to be applicable in community dementia care settings.

It was a great meeting and I am excited to meet again next month. I'll keep you posted.