Under the close supervision of clinical professionals, the care coordinator assistants, known as CCAs, work as integral health care team members conducting home and phone visits with dementia patients and family caregivers. CCAs, who typically have at most two years of post-high school education, are selected through a rigorous and innovative screening process. Once hired and trained, CCAs are assigned tasks focused on patient engagement and caregiver support that require less training and expertise than that of nurses or social workers.
As the number of older adults increases and health care resources cannot keep pace, the question of how to provide good care for this growing population has become increasingly pressing.
"We have shown that with good management, supervision, and support, CCAs can be effective primary care extenders enabling many tasks important to providing best practice care for older adults to be "shifted" down," said social psychologist and Alzheimer's disease educator Mary Guerriero Austrom, Ph.D., who led the study. "The key is screening to select the right people -- people who are comfortable with older adults with cognitive issues -- and then teaching and training them [CCAs], and giving them the resources and support they need to do the job. If you take care of your people, they will do an excellent job of taking care of patients."
CCAs are the health care team's eyes and ears in the community and the homes where patients and their caregivers live.