Mark Toles discusses Connect Home on WCHL
Mark Toles, PhD, RN recently appeared on the WCHL program Focus Carolina and was highlighted on the Chapelboro website for his transitional care-centered program Connect Home.
Toles is an assistant professor of gerontology and systems/policy/informatics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Nursing. He has received numerous awards and grants recognizing his work in the field, including an NC TraCS KL2 Program Award.
Toles is the developer of Connect Home, a transitional care intervention for older adults as they transition from skilled nursing facilities to home, and the primary point of discussion in his interview on WCHL. “Transitional care are services and supports designed to help people as they transfer between settings of care,” Toles said in the interview. “For example, someone who goes from a hospital to home, like if they were in a hospital three or four days and then they were going straight back home.”
His collaborative program’s ultimate mission is to use tools developed in this program to train patients and caregivers on how to safely make this transition with as few complications as possible. “We looked at the data for about 55,000 patients in North and South Carolina and in the process of doing that we saw that after about 90 days after discharge of high percentage of patients were back in the emergency department back in the hospital and some had died. So, Connect Home was specifically designed to see if we could prevent some of those acute problems that we saw in the epidemiological data.”