Use of a Nursing-led Geriatrics Consult Service to Deliver Age-Friendly Care

The William S. Middleton Memorial VA hospital in Madison has been committed to improving the care for aging Veterans including the support of the Elder Veteran Program (EVP). EVP is a nursing-led approach to deliver inpatient consultative geriatrics care at the hospital. Much of the care provided on EVP already addressed many components of IHI’s Age-Friendly 4Ms, though not consistently. EVP committed to reliably providing the 4Ms to all older adults seen in the program by modifying workflows and documentation using a Plan-Do-Study-Act approach, resulting in improvements in the frequency of documentation of the 4Ms. Overall, the project demonstrates a novel way to integrate the 4M elements into a hospital system by leveraging an existing nursing-led geriatric consult service focused on prevention and education.