Implementing culture change practices in nursing homes can have a powerful impact on the daily life of frail residents and their caregivers and on the quality of care. Over the past five years, the California Culture Change Coalition has actively promoted these principles throughout California in a variety of ways: educational sessions at conferences, stakeholder engagement, and working directly with nursing home staff in small groups.

This paper reports on the success of these efforts, as measured against the following four goals:

• Provide a forum that is inclusive of all partners who represent the nursing home community.
• Create a unified effort to build empowered relationship-centered communities in nursing homes throughout California.
• Establish a statewide network of culture change resources for providers that support transformational change.
• Promote the values, principles, and practices of the culture change movement throughout California through identification and dissemination of innovative models of person-centered care and facility management that support relationship-centered communities.

The findings suggest that culture change can and should flourish even in the current economic environment with sufficient strategic planning and efforts to link culture change to existing initiatives that have broad-based support.

The complete paper is available as a Document Download.