In an advance, the federal government now requires the interviewing of residents as part of its clinical assessment of residents in Medicare- or Medicaid-certified nursing facilities. A new video, funded by the Picker Institute and developed by the UCLA/Jewish Home, demonstrates best practice approaches for nursing home staff for implementing the interviews for cognition, mood, preferences and pain.
The Video on Interviewing Vulnerable Elders (VIVE) includes the reason interviews have been added to the federal assessment process known as the Minimum Data Set (MDS), techniques to improve communication with older, frail populations, and demonstrations of interviews, using real nurses interacting in scenarios based on real situations. VIVE developer Debra Saliba, M.D., M.P.H., the Anna & Harry Borun Chair in Geriatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and director of the UCLA and Jewish Homes Borun Center, led the national development and testing of MDS 3.0 for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
VIVE can be ordered free from CMS (CMS Product No. 11479-CD). The MDS 3 training materials, including a VIVE video (link), can also be found on the CMS webpage.