Tuesday, May 13, 2008
RCI's goal is to support development of Quality Care in long-term, home and community-based services. We believe that increase the use of "science that works" is a critical part of this work. Evidence-based interventions in our view have the greatest chance of improving the health and well being of caregivers and serve as the foundation for quality care. Research and experience have shown the difficulty of translating evidence-based interventions into public health practice and policy, however. As a result, our aim is to facilitate the process of moving science to practice and building effective bridges between researchers and caregivers.
We define evidence-based to mean that an intervention has undergone sufficient scientific evaluation to be proven to be effective and strongly linked to desirable outcomes such as reductions in caregivers' depressive symptoms and increases in measures of coping. Not all evidence-based interventions are effective in practice. A program may be ineffective for many reasons; it may be poorly implemented, provided at too low a "dose", have no followup or those implementing it may be poorly trained in how to deliver the intervention. Interventions may also work with some populations, but not others, or under certain conditions, but not others. This is why an ongoing program of research and evaluation is needed to develop an intervention and test it under "real world" conditions. Find out what effective caregiver programs have in common.