Ohio State University School of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences
Upskilling Care Partners to Provide Nutritional Support for People Living with Dementia
Dr. Juckett is an assistant professor in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at The Ohio State University. Dr. Juckett is an occupational therapist with extensive experience practicing in inpatient and geriatric rehabilitation settings. She completed a PhD in social work to examine how social services (e.g., home-delivered meal programs) can optimize the independence of community-dwelling older adults. Her research aims to implement evidence-based practices – tailored to older adults – that are designed to reduce the need for more advanced and costly services. Dr. Juckett also leads initiatives through the American Congress for Rehabilitation Medicine and the American Occupational Therapy Association to help professionals in the field of aging apply implementation science methodologies to research and practice. Dr. Juckett is seeking to develop skills in intervention development, patient-caregiver relevant outcomes, and pragmatic trial design to design interventions that help PLWD meet their most basic health and nutritional needs.
Nearly two million people living with dementia (PLWD) in the United States are malnourished, leading to rapid cognitive decline and the loss of independence. To reduce the risk of malnourishment, home-delivered meal programs provide nutritional support to PLWD in the community – half of whom live with a care partner. Given that PLWD are highly susceptible to malnutrition-related health complications, there is a unique opportunity to develop interventions that “upskill” care partners in the provision of nutritional support in home-delivered meal systems. This Career Development Award will provide Dr. Juckett with training and mentorship in intervention development, pragmatic trial design, and stakeholder-engaged research. The research will be guided by the socio-ecological model and tenets of intervention mapping to address the following Specific Aims: (1) To conduct a needs assessment to identify modifiable factors of nutritional health among PLWD in home-delivered meal systems, and (2) To develop the NU-CARE (Nutritional support Upskilling for CARE partners) program to support nutritional health in PLWD. This award will provide the foundation for a future embedded pragmatic clinical trial (ePCT) to test the effectiveness of NU-CARE in PLWD and their care partners. The long-term goal of this work is to implement NU-CARE widely and optimize its sustainability in home-delivered meal systems nationwide.