May 7, 2013

Palliative care in nursing homes is becoming increasingly important in Belgium, which is investing further in the implementation of interRAI instruments. In 2010, 15.2% of the men who died in Belgium, died in a nursing home, and 32.9% of the women.

"We do not have measurements on the quality of care. But from experience, we can infer that in some cases, nurses lack the necessary knowledge about palliative care," said [interRAI’s Anja] Declercq, advocating for better communication between all parties involved in the nursing home, especially between the resident, his family, and all caregivers.

"For example, Dutch research shows that family members often have a very different idea about how long the patient has to live than the doctor." Palliative care should also move with the times. "Now comes a generation of older people who will be more demanding and assertive than before."

The above is translated from an article in the De Morgen on 19 April 2013, covering the interRAI conference organized by LUCAS, the Centre for Care Research and Consultancy at KU Leuven.

March 20, 2013

We are excited to report that the development of interRAI assessments for children and youth is progressing extremely well. These assessments form a suite that will be the first to provide an integrated response to identifying and responding to child/youth mental health needs. 

Pilot testing has started for five interRAI child and youth suite assessments. These share a focus on assessing mental health needs but are designed for specific populations or settings, including typically developing children and youth from 4 to 18 years, those with developmental disabilities, those with complex needs who receive services in the home and are between 0 and 18 years, adolescents, and a short screener that can be used to identify whether further, more comprehensive assessment of needs is required. These tools are being used by 206 service providers across twenty-five agencies within the province of Ontario, including inpatient/residential services and outpatient services delivered in the community as well as in schools.

As of February 2013, the assessments that focus on mental health needs for typically developing children and youth and their respective manuals will also be available in French. Continuing efforts also involve extensive collaboration to develop interRAI child/youth assessments for youth justice and education settings. The state of Arkansas is now implementing use of interRAI assessments as a foundation of an equitable, needs-based service system for children and youth with developmental disabilities.

The project recently received $100,000 from the London Community Foundation in Ontario, Canada, to further support the development and testing of the assessments designed for typically developing children and youth, as well as adolescents and those with developmental disabilities.

Watch for our upcoming child and youth research publications on the interRAI Web site. Several articles related to child/youth data collected using interRAI assessments will be posted shortly.

Click here if you want to learn more about the interRAI Child and Youth Mental Health/Developmental Disability suite of tools.

Click here if you want to learn more about the London Community Foundation.

March 20, 2013

The New Zealand government recently announced that use of the interRAI LTCF Assessment System will become mandatory in aged residential care as of July 2015. By June 2014 all aged residential facilities in New Zealand will be participating in the roll-out of the assessment tool.

The assessment will assist nurses in aged-care facilities in providing quality care for residents by supplying a comprehensive clinical assessment of needs that supports the development of tailor-made care plans.

New Zealand Associate Health Minister Jo Goodhew noted that comprehensive clinical assessment will provide opportunities to support continuous quality improvement in aged care. "The Auditor General's September 2012 report, Effectiveness of Arrangements to Check The Standard of Services Provided By Rest Homes, emphasises the importance of comprehensive clinical assessment in monitoring the quality of care for older people."

The roll-out in aged residential care follows the successful implementation of interRAI home care assessments for clients of home-based support services completed in 2012.

October 25, 2012

Dr. John Hirdes, professor in the Department of Health Studies and Gerontology, University of Waterloo, and the Ontario Home Care Research and Knowledge Exchange Chair, was recognized on October 23 at the Canadian Home Care Association Conference with the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee medal.  The medal, part of the Canadian System of Honours, is bestowed to individuals who have made a significant contribution to a particular province, territory, region or community within Canada, or an achievement abroad that brings credit to Canada.  Dr. Hirdes was honored for his leadership in the development and adoption of the interRAI Home Care Assessment System and the Method for Assigning Priority Levels algorithm.  These tools enable the delivery of high quality home care and community care services across Canada. 

July 23, 2012

The journal Nature recently published findings of a rare genetic mutation that protects people against Alzheimer’s disease.  The new evidence is the strongest yet that excessive levels of a normal brain substance, beta amyloid, are to blame for the disease and may lead to new discoveries on how it can be prevented.

With the help of interRAI assessment tools, using data being collected for over ten years in Iceland,  the study was able to build a “super-control” group (people who demonstrated remarkably stable cognitive function) against others suffering from the disease.  This “super-control” group was found to have a mutation in the APP gene, acting as nature’s “preventative treatment” against Alzheimer’s.  The discovery has led to renewed hope that anti-amyloid drugs that are already under development might alter the disease’s course, or prevent it altogether. The study also demonstrates the many uses of interRAI assessment data. 

Further reading:

"A mutation in APP protects against Alzheimer's disease and age-related cognitive decline" – Nature

"In Preventing Alzheimer's, Mutation May Aid Drug Quest" – The New York Times

June 21, 2012

There’s a fresh new look and feel at www.interRAI.org these days, and lots of new content as well, thanks to the efforts of Magnus Bjorkgren and his international Web team. New content has been added in the areas of Instruments and Applications, and the Fellows' bios have all been standardized and updated. You can now sign up for our quarterly newsletter. We also populated a world map with interRAI instruments (mandated and in use/testing) to show how interRAI reaches around the globe, in many languages, as the organization moves toward becoming a global health care standard.  We welcome your feedback!

In addition, interRAI recently launched a new SharePoint repository for its Fellows and vendors, giving them a centralized, online workspace which will help eliminate typical bottlenecks such as documents buried in email and on local machines. If you require access or have questions about the new Repository, please contact us. We welcome this first step toward a secure management system for our intellectual property. 

May 31, 2012

interRAI is supplementing its paper and electronic book offerings (available at http://catalog.interRAI.org) with an online subscription site, where individuals as well as institutions may subscribe to and access interRAI content - one book at a time, or a whole bookshelf - for less than the cost of a per-copy purchase, from anywhere on the Internet.

Content can be either accessed online or downloaded to a proprietary iOffline reader. Your interRAI publications can also be customized with bookmarks, notes, and highlights.

Annual subscription pricing is based on the concurrent user model. For example, with the "Long-Term Care Facilities (LTCF) Assessment Form and User's Manual," which lists for $49.45 per ebook, the annual subscription fee for up to five concurrent users is $82, up to ten concurrent users, $161, and so on, incrementally, up to seventy-five concurrent users for an annual fee of $1,051. An institution might license access to the entire interRAI standard suite for five concurrent users for $944 per year, for example.

interRAI hopes that the addition of this new functionality will help increase the reach of interRAI instruments worldwide. We look forward to hearing from interested organizations. Please contact us by email, or call customer service at +1-866-595-5055 to discuss your institutional needs so we can arrive at a subscription solution that works for you.

July 25, 2011

In a paper published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal on June 27, Dutch researchers demonstrated that a multi-disciplinary intervention centered on the interRAI Long-Term Care Facilities (LTCF) Assessment System improved the quality of care of residents of Dutch residential aged care facilities. The study employed a cluster randomized controlled design involving ten facilities and 340 residents, ensuring that the results are robust and convincing. 

See http://www.cmaj.ca/content/early/2011/06/27/cmaj.101498 for the full report.

This study provides further evidence that a systematic approach to assessment and care planning provides important benefits for older people in institutional settings, echoing the results of an earlier study using the interRAI home care system conducted by Bernabei and colleagues (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC28532/).

The interRAI LTCF — a key component of the new interRAI Suite — is now being deployed in many countries around the world, including Australia, Belgium, Italy, New Zealand, Singapore, and Spain, adding to the widespread use of the earlier version RAI MDS 2.0.  In the next few years, many of these earlier adopters are expected to upgrade to the interRAI LTCF. 

May 10, 2011

interRAI is now publishing its first ebooks. The four pilot titles are:

• interRAI Home Care (HC) Assessment Form and User’s Manual
• interRAI Mental Health (MH) Assessment Form and User’s Manual for In-patient Psychiatry
• interRAI Acute Care (AC) Assessment Form and User’s Manual
• interRAI Palliative Care (PC) Assessment Form and User’s Manual

We expect to have all interRAI’s current titles launched this spring. The ebookstore’s ViewInside feature allows you to browse through selected contents of an ebook before deciding whether to buy it. After purchasing and downloading an ebook to your digital bookshelf (using free Adobe Digital Editions software), you can customize and annotate it using the bookmarking and notes features. However, you cannot share, copy and paste, or print the ebook. Priced at 10% below retail, the ebooks are PDF-based and are optimized for desktop machines and laptops.

Here’s your chance to liberate yourself and your organization from paper by taking advantage of interRAI’s new digital resource! Through our ebookstore, you will receive the latest version of interRAI content rapidly, without incurring the delays and expenses of paper distribution.

As always, we welcome your input as interRAI’s ebookstore grows and develops. Our goal is for interRAI instruments to be used as extensively as possible; if you are interested in a multiple-copy purchase or a volume discount for your institution, please email us at interRAI-ebooks@obs.com and we will work out the details.

You can visit the new ebookstore at: ebooks.interRAI.org