Charles House-Yorktown Eldercare Home: A Program and Evaluation Plan

With the aging of the American population and the rising prevalence of chronic disease and disability, there will be increasing numbers of older Americans in need of long-term care in the coming decades. Unfortunately, many current models of residential long-term care are associated with suboptimal quality of life for residents and high levels of caregiver burden among their family caregivers. The Charles House-Yorktown Eldercare Home is a small care home that was started in 2011 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in response to the need for holistic residential eldercare expressed by local families caring for elder relatives in the community, and its overarching goal is to provide high quality residential elder care in a community context. The program provides person-centered residential care to 6 elders in a small, home-like setting in a suburban neighborhood and purposefully involves family caregivers in care and household life. As a next step in community involvement, the Eldercare Home plans to reach out to neighbors and other stakeholders to learn how it might better support and enhance the neighborhood and its needs. The purpose of the following program and evaluation plan is to outline the program's development to date and its future directions, formally articulate its goals, and plan for evaluation, towards program improvement and dissemination. The program's logic model provides a framework for linking goals and activities, and is accompanied by a detailed implementation plan. A mini-systematic literature review provides insight into evaluation methods reported in the literature by similar programs. The focus of evaluation plans is elucidated through consideration of resources and rationale for undertaking evaluation. Evaluation planning tables provide a framework for an observational mixed-methods approach, and dissemination plans for evaluation findings are also outlined. The Charles House-Yorktown Eldercare Home program represents a novel strategy for improving the quality of life of elders who require residential care as well as that of their family caregivers, while engaging the surrounding neighborhood in mutually beneficial ways.Master of Public Healt