Foundation supports innovation in adult day care - Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's 'Partners in Caregiving: The Dementia Services Program'

Health Care Financing Review, Spring, 1993

Fifty adult day centers across the country have been chosen to participate in the $2.5-million "Partners in Caregiving: The Dementia Services Program," a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) initiative designed to stimulate innovation in the field of adult day care.

Adult day centers offer supervised social, recreational, and health activities in a group setting while other centers also provide individualized care. Partners in Caregiving is intended to strengthen and expand the services that adult day centers offer to better meet the needs of people with chronic cognitive disorders and their caregivers. The program also is designed to help centers become financially self-sufficient.

The 50 sites participating in this initiative will receive free programmatic and administrative assistance as well as staff training. Each center will develop innovative in-home or center-based services, build upon existing ones, and extend services to people with chronic disorders other than Alzheimer's disease.

In addition to technical assistance, sites will be eligible to compete for 20 implementation grants totaling $2.5 million to be awarded on a rolling basis until funds have been depleted. Grantees will receive a maximum of $150,000 each for up to 36 months, and will be expected to acquire matching funds locally--$l for every $2 of RWJF funds they receive.

RWJF's $3.9 million Dementia Care and Respite Services Program, on which the partners program is based, showed that adult day centers can provide an array of beneficial services to participants and their caregivers at an affordable price.

"Partners in Caregiving is designed to apply the lessons from the original program to a new group of sites quickly, economically, and with similar success," said Dr. Steven A. Schroeder, president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. "We want to provide a stimulus to the field of adult day care so that every community will be able to care for the needs of its elderly."

Direction and administration for the program is being provided by Dr. Burton V. Reifler, professor and chairman of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine; and the associate director, Rona Smyth Henry, both of Bowman Gray School of Medicine of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

RWJF is the Nation's largest private philanthropy in the United States dedicated exclusively to health care. RWJF is expected to award more than $175 million in grants to improve health care in 1993.

For more information, contact Marc S. Kaplan at (609) 243-5937.