The Anna and Harry Borun Center for Gerontological Research

About the Borun Center

This website is built around the work of the Anna and Harry Borun Center for Gerontological Research, a joint venture between the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the Los Angeles Jewish Home in Reseda. Established in 1989, the Borun Center is an interdisciplinary center for applied research that focuses on creating, testing, and promoting the adoption of behavioral interventions to improve daily care and quality of life in nursing homes. The Center's mission encompasses three primary objectives:

1. identify factors that affect the quality of life of frail nursing home residents;
2. develop and test interventions to improve life quality for this population; and
3. disseminate these interventions by providing a model for their use; fostering their use through this website as well as through publications, conferences, and collaboration; and ensuring their adoption by providing a system of training and expert support.

The Center's work, designed to help nursing homes make the most of the resources they have on hand to enhance patient care and improve clinical outcomes, is exceptional for several reasons:

• The Center's interventions address everyday nursing home routines that profoundly impact quality of life for residents, including Incontinence Management, Weight Loss Prevention, Pain Screening, Mobility Decline Prevention, Quality-of-Life Assessment, and Pressure Ulcer Prevention.
• Center interventions in each of these areas have proven effective in research trials, and most were evaluated in randomized controlled trials, the gold standard for research studies.
• The Center's work has yielded validated, reliable protocols that serve as easy-to-follow step-by-step instructions for implementing resident assessments and daily care interventions. These self-explanatory protocols enable nursing home staff to readily implement the assessments and interventions with minimal need for outside assistance.
• The Center also has developed quality control protocols for managing interventions and ensuring quality of care over time.

To the best of our knowledge, no other research center in the nation can lay claim to a body of work of comparable breadth, depth, and quality. Debra Saliba, MD, MPH, is the new director of the Borun Center. Dr. Saliba is an associate professor of geriatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine. She has a strong track record in applied research to improve the quality of life of frail older persons. She has developed methods to identify inappropriate transfers from nursing homes to hospitals; researched disaster response and resident safety; developed quality measures for vulnerable adults in long-term care; and examined the relationship between nursing home structure and quality.