TOUCH COPD
Overview
Organization: COPD Foundation
Start Date: September 2018
End Date: April 2019
Primary Goal: Goal 2: Improve the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and management of COPD by improving the quality of care delivered across the health care continuum.
Secondary Goal(s):
- Goal 1: Empower people with COPD, their families, and caregivers to recognize and reduce the burden of COPD.
Objective(s):
- Increase public awareness of the risk factors and symptoms of COPD so that earlier diagnosis of symptomatic individuals becomes the norm
- Increase the effectiveness and variety of outreach communication campaigns and activities that utilize evidence-based approaches to raise awareness of COPD, particularly among those at high risk, and help people diagnosed with COPD manage the disease
- Develop a unified, multidisciplinary educational curriculum for health care professionals, including primary health care providers, using harmonized clinical practice guidelines
- Develop, in accordance with clinical quality measures, a clinical decision tree and other tools to enable high-quality care for people with COPD
Collaboration: Signature HealthCare
Activity Type: Event, Provider education, Training
Activity Description
The COPD Foundation has had the privilege of participating with the NHLBI as a subcontractor for a program to improve COPD education in rural America. The TOUCH (Teaching and Outreach in Underserved Communities and Health Improvement) COPD program focused on communities in rural Tennessee with high COPD rates. TOUCH COPD aimed to reduce hospital readmission and mortality rates for individuals with COPD in the skilled nursing facility setting through improving early recognition of disease symptoms and helping health care professionals strengthen their understanding of COPD to gain the skills needed to effectively treat their patients.This project closely aligns with the goals outlined in CNAP in that it empowered those with COPD, their families, and caregivers to recognize and reduce the burden of COPD (Goal 1) with a primary focus on improving the quality of care across the health care continuum, thus improving the diagnosis, prevention, treatment, and management of COPD (Goal 2).
Through TOUCH COPD we created a train-the-trainer program designed to provide leaders in local communities with the skills they need to effectively train others to understand the disease and appropriate treatment strategies. The training program consisted of two webinars and one live event targeting five skilled nursing facilities (SNF) in our focus area. These 20-25 people would then become trainers for their own facility and others in their community. We used both Learn More Breathe Better and COPD Foundation education materials to help the trainers bring valuable information into their communities.
Audience
General Audience: Patients, Caregivers or family members, Health professionals
Focused Audience: n/a
Program Reach: Local: Eastern Tennessee
Type of Area: Rural
Setting: Health care
Cost and Funding Sources
$15,000 was provided via an NHLBI subcontract from the Learn More Breathe Better Program as well as in-kind funding.Impact Analysis
Participants provided feedback via a survey. Overall, workshops were rated highly with all respondents rating the event a 4 or 5 (exceeded their expectations) on a 5-point scale. 100 percent of participants shared information from the workshops/webinars with their co-workers or other individuals. Nearly 70 percent of respondents indicated that the information received changed the way they worked with the patients with COPD for whom they are. Last, more than 8 of 10 respondents felt the information shared in the workshop improved care of patients with COPD at their facility.Advice or Lessons Learned
Through the TOUCH project, we sought to serve a high-needs rural population, while learning how to better integrate additional health care stakeholders that haven’t traditionally focused on COPD, yet account for a great deal of contact with vulnerable patients. We sought to better understand how to reach the patient-care staff at skilled nursing facilities in rural areas, how to deliver education that could be acted on, and how to motivate those involved to extend the new knowledge to others in their facilities.Overall, we learned there is indeed a need for directed outreach and education to the health care providers in the post-acute space. Much time, energy, and resources have been devoted to education in the acute/in-patient phase of the care continuum, but the post-acute phase still has a lot of ground to make up. With the upcoming readmission penalties for skilled nursing facilities, this is an opportune time to encourage improved education for the COPD community. One administrator mentioned that she was pleased that her facility team had attended and were “now better equipped to care for COPDers” in their area. She also stated that she believed this would help with patient satisfaction as well as hospital readmission numbers. Despite the continued turnover in leadership at our core partner, their ultimate willingness to continue to devote staff time and resources to improving their COPD care reinforced our belief that a scaled-up effort focused on skilled living is a viable and necessary program.
With regards to the delivery of education, we felt the decision to structure this project with the two preliminary webinars was important to our success. It allowed us to learn from the participants where the weaknesses were and the gaps in knowledge as it relates to caring for the COPD population. This was key in being able to provide the most meaningful use of time for the in-person workshop day. Moving forward, we would encourage others to utilize a multi-phase approach to ensure level setting education is done and to give sufficient time to understand the environment, challenges, barriers to change, and personal goals of participating health care professionals.
With this project, we created multiple opportunities for the skilled facilities to engage with us and find out where they needed the most support. Our conversations, for instance, showed that there is a feeling that patients and families need a lot of support when patients are discharged from their facility back home. There may be some of this education and resource sharing that would be beneficial to share with homecare agencies or DME providers to continue the education and support of the patient.
Contact Information
COPD Foundation
Senior Director of Community Education Programs
Miami
Florida