A core mission of the Foundation for Quality Care is developing, designing and implementing specialized educational programs for health care professionals working in the long term care (LTC) field. Health care in general, and long term care in particular, is becoming increasingly complex and requires advanced skill sets, high vocational aptitudes  and continuous education to keep pace with the rapid changes that are occurring in the field. To promote consistently high standards of care, the Foundation strives to stay on the leading edge of these changes by pioneering highly specialized educational programs that are not offered in traditional academic settings or through routine in-service training.  The Foundation also strives to deliver its unique educational programs in non-traditional ways that increase accessibility, convenience and affordability for the participants. Through well established working partnerships with respected academic institutions, professional associations and expert practitioners the Foundation is also able to offer educational programming that conforms to the highest professional and academic standards. Many of the programs offered by the Foundation are academically accredited and provide college credits or continuing education units (CEUs) that are applicable toward undergraduate and graduate degrees, or requirements of professional licensure. 

 

The Foundation’s educational programming ranges across various disciplines and vocations. Since its inception the Foundation has offered educational programs on clinical best practices, quality improvement, nutrition, medical ethics, family and resident relations, workplace safety, regulatory compliance, staff and workforce development.   The Foundation is continually designing, developing and implementing specialized educational programming to address the entire vertical and vocational spectrum of long term care providers from front line care staff to the nursing home administrator (Chief Executive). The spectrum of vocations and disciplines includes nursing assistants, staff nurses, nurse educators, directors of nursing, social service workers, therapists (physical, occupational, recreational, mental health), nutritionists/dieticians, physicians, medical directors and licensed nursing home administrators. Experience demonstrates that to transform and elevate the quality of long term health care requires a comprehensive, inter-disciplinary, systems driven approach to health care management, This an important guiding principle that shapes the design and development of our educational programs.

Each year the Foundation offers a broad variety of educational workshops, conferences, seminars and continuing education courses. Since 2003, over 2,000 long term care professionals have participated in 50 educational programs at locations across the state of New York. Some of the recent educational programs are noted below.

 

Our flagship educational program is the Long Term Care Leadership Institute. This program is in the development stage and the Foundation is currently seeking grant funding to support this bold initiative.  The Institute is a comprehensive, career-ladder educational program that provides accredited and non-accredited leadership training for first line nurse managers, nurse educators, directors of nursing and for licensed nurse home administrators. The Long Term Care Leadership Institute is an expansion of the Nurse Leadership Institute that successfully trained 200 directors of nursing  from 2003-2005 through a grant from the New York State Department of Health- Health Workforce Retraining Initiative. These grant funds were also used to successfully pilot a Nurse Educator Program in 2005. A licensed nursing home Administrator Leadership Program was also successfully piloted in spring of 2006. The pilot Administrator Program was funded solely by the Foundation.

 

For current and future educational offerings please visit the Upcoming Programs section of this site.