THE STATUS OF QUALITY CONTROL OF GERIATRIC CARE INSTITUTIONS IN SHANGHAI: A SURVEY

To investigate the situation of quality control in geriatric care institutions (GCI) and identify the existing problems and propose management strategies, a questionnaire survey and field survey was conducted in 270 GCIs in Shanghai in 2014, including facilities, human resources, characteristics of elder patients, distribution of adverse events and quality of geriatric care. Descriptive methods were used for data analysis. Totally 25 geriatric care hospitals (GCH) and 245 community health service centers (CHSC) responded to the survey. There were 6140 beds for elderly care in GCHs where mean length stay of elder patients were 140 days, while 10265 beds in CHSCs where mean length stay of elder patients were 119 days. The proportions of nursing assistants, nurses, medical physicians and technicians in GCHs were 37.91%, 29.11%, 19.62% and 13.35%, while those in CHSCs were 14.14%, 34.59%, 36.47% and 14.80%. The top five most frequent adverse events in GCHs were fall, medication, catheter, diet and transfusion related events, while those in CHSCs were medication, fall, catheter, transfusion and hurt related events. During field survey, public GCHs were found better in quality of elderly care than private ones after expert assessments. Our results indicate that administrators in GCIs should improve medical and nursing facilities, increase human resource, optimize geriatric nurse training system, implement risk analysis and quality management to promote quality of care for the elderly.