Penn Nursing Partnership Launches New Center to Test and Implement Dementia Care
Nearly seven million people in the U.S. are living with Alzheimer’s and related diseases (ADRD), according to the Alzheimer’s Association — a number that has more than doubled in the last 20 years. While funding and support to advance the science of dementia care has increased substantially, care innovations still need to be successfully implemented outside of healthcare organizations and test cases that are difficult to replicate. To address this issue, a unique partnership between Penn Nursing, the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota, the University of Wisconsin, and Drexel University College of Nursing and Health Professions, is launching the Establishing Mechanisms of Benefit to Reinforce the Alzheimer’s Care Experience (EMBRACE) AD/ADRD Roybal Center.
September 16, 2024
The EMBRACE center is supported by a five-year, $5.8 million grant from the National Institute on Aging. It will consist of at least six trials that will rigorously evaluate why dementia care interventions are effective. The center’s goal is to advance research capacity for “mechanism driven” dementia care interventions – an approach to testing interventions that specifically identifies why dementia care interventions work. This information is critical to scale interventions into home and community settings.
The center will guide progress in scaling dementia care by focusing on a specific action, benefit, or behavioral change that is the key to its success. Once this crucial factor is identified, the intervention will be tailored and tested to work within different settings or communities. Penn Nursing’s Nancy Hodgson, PhD, RN, FAAN, the Claire M. Fagin Leadership Professor in Nursing, and Chair of the Department of Biobehavioral Health Sciences, will co-lead EMBRACE’s Behavioral Intervention Development Core. This Core will provide the scientific infrastructure, including mentorship and academic, scientific, and educational resources to investigators conducting non-pharmacological supporting interventions for people living with dementia and their caregivers.
“A clear understanding of how and why a supportive care program works is critical to moving a dementia care intervention from a clinical trial in the lab into the homes and communities of families affected by dementia,” said Hodgson.
The EMBRACE center will provide consultation, and support to investigators who wish to progress towards larger scale and more rigorous testing of their trials. The center will also offer educational resources, workshops, and opportunities for researchers to advance the science of dementia care to close the gap between academic research and real-world, scalable interventions to support the millions of Americans living with ADRD and those who care for them.
