PRESS RELEASES
SAU Receives NICHE Designation
Addison Gilbert Hospital’s Senior Adult Unit Receives NICHE Designation
(Gloucester, MA) - Addison Gilbert Hospital (AGH) announced today that its Senior Adult Unit (SAU) has earned designation as a Nurses Improving Care for Health System Elders (NICHE) site, a national program to improve care for older hospitalized adults. Addison Gilbert, a member of Northeast Health System, is one of only eight sites in Massachusetts who have been certified as a NICHE site and is the only community hospital among the group. There are only 194 sites nationally and 25 in Canada.
The SAU service is unique in that it is an Acute Care for the Elderly (ACE) program which specializes in treating seniors with emotional and medical illnesses in a senior-friendly environment. First opened in 2004, the SAU admits 25 patients per month with an average length of stay of 10 days. Patients are referred from home, senior housing or other healthcare settings. While on the unit, the focus of care is to treat acute illness with the goal of achieving optimal health and functional restoration through emotional, medical and physical modalities. The interdisciplinary treatment team consists of physicians, nurses, social workers, occupational and physical therapists and dieticians.
“Through this program, Addison Gilbert’s SAU has undertaken a number of steps to prevent, recognize and treat these health problems,” said James Purdy, vice president of Inpatient Behavioral Health for Northeast Health System. “By becoming part of the NICHE program, we expect to significantly advance our understanding of the needs of our older patients, train our nurses to meet those needs and launch several new protocols to prevent healthcare problems that can beset older people in the hospital.”
In 1994, the Hartford Institute for Geriatric Nursing, based at NYU launched the NICHE program to help hospitals improve methods of caring for older adults. NICHE was created in recognition of three converging trends: the aging of the population of hospital patients; the ongoing national nursing shortage, especially in geriatric-trained nurses; and the need for hospitals to contain costs while improving patients’ health care experience. Recognizing the national scarcity of geriatric-trained nurses, NICHE aims to improve care of older people by improving approaches to some core geriatric issues such as fall risks, pain management and the use of family involvement in decision-making.
More than 70 percent of all AGH’s inpatient admissions are over the age of 65 and face a variety of health risks specific to elders. Nationally, more than half of all hospitalized patients are over 65.
Addison Gilbert Hospital
Addison Gilbert Hospital is a full-service, 58-bed medical/surgical acute care facility. The hospital provides inpatient and outpatient care to residents of the Cape Ann community in specialties such as cancer care, surgical day care, critical care and emergency medicine. Addison Gilbert Hospital has been nationally recognized by Solucient Institute as a 100 Top Hospital five times in the past seven years. Addison Gilbert Hospital is a member of Northeast Health System.
