Kent Hospital Participates in National Age-Friendly Health Systems Initiative

Kent Hospital announced last week that it is part of an Age Friendly initiative to enhance health care for older adults, joining more than 100 health systems across the nation striving to promote healthy aging with guidance from The John A. Hartford Foundation and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, in partnership with the American Hospital Association and the Catholic Health Association of the United States  to implement a series of evidence-based practices focused on addressing four essential elements of care for older patients:

•  What Matters: Know and align care with each older adult’s specific health outcome goals and care preferences including, but not limited to, end-of-life care, and across settings of care.
•  Medication: If medication is necessary, use Age-Friendly medication that does not interfere with What Matters to the older adult, Mobility, or Mentation across settings of care.
•  Mentation: Prevent, identify, treat, and manage dementia, depression, and delirium across settings of care.
•  Mobility: Ensure that older adults move safely every day in order to maintain function and do What Matters.

To read more about Kent Hospitals’s commitment to reliably implement evidence based interventions across care settings and better tailor services to expressed goals and preferences of older adults, read their press release, here http://www.kentri.org/news/age-friendly-initiative.cfm

The Age-Friendly Health Systems initiative was launched in 2017 by The John A. Hartford Foundation and IHI with a commitment to make 20 percent of hospitals and health systems in the United States age-friendly by 2020. For more information, visit ihi.org/agefriendly.