Assisted Living Through Research, Policy, and Practice What's in the Name?

Helena Temkin-Greener is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Rochester, School of Medicine and Dentistry, in New York, USA. She is also the founder and the director of the Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) National Data Center (PDAC).  Her research is focused in the following areas: quality of care – developing outcome measures and assessing quality of care in community-based, hospital and long-term care settings; organizational performance – developing and validating measures of care process, teamwork, and patient safety; aging and long-term care – assessing the impact of individual and organizational risk factors on quality of care for vulnerable elderly, including disparities; palliative and end-of-life care – design, implementation and evaluation of interventions to improve care; and mental illness – understanding access to and quality of care for patients with mental health disorders and with dementia. Her work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, PCORI, and other federal and private funders.

Sheryl Zimmerman is a University Distinguished Professor in the Schools of Social Work and Public Health; the Director of the national Center for Excellence in Assisted Living at the University of North Carolina (CEAL@UNC); and Co-Director of the Program on Aging, Chronic Illness, and Long-term Care in the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. She is internationally recognized as a leader in research related to care and outcomes for older adults receiving long-term care, including persons living with dementia, and most notably those residing in assisted living. In 1996 Zimmerman founded the Collaborative Studies of Long-Term Care, the largest ongoing national research consortium of thousands of long-term care settings across the country that have participated in almost 100 projects with continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and foundations. She has written five books and more than 450 peer-reviewed publications.