Sampling
dementia
FRASER
To be eligible to participate, LTC homes had to (a) be a part of the TREC cohort in Alberta and British Columbia; (b) have units comprising general nursing care for older adults, rather than those co-managed with acute care; (c) have the majority of residents over the age of 65; (d) have more than 35 beds in total; (e) be geographically located within 100km of either Edmonton: Edmonton Health Zone (EH) or Calgary: Calgary Health Zone (CH) in Alberta (AB), or Kelowna: Interior Health (IH), or New Westminster: Fraser Health (FH) in British Columbia (BC); (f) use the Resident Assessment Instrument-Minimum Data Set 2-0 (RAI-MDS) to gather resident level care indicators; and (g) have 8 or more care aide responses to the baseline trial data collection survey.Eligible LTC homes were stratified by region (EH, CH, IH, FH), owner operator model (for profit, not for profit), and size (small: <80 beds, medium: eight-120 beds, large: >120 beds), and randomly selected for participation. Based upon feedback from decision-makers and LTC home administrators, it was decided that randomization to intervention or control at the outset would not be feasible because of the likelihood of bias favouring refusal to participate as an inactive “control” site. Thus, Because of the limited number of eligible LTC homes in the cohort, homes which declined to participate were returned to the main TREC cohort to act as usual care (control) comparators. After removing ineligible units (those who did not participate in both the baseline and follow up data collections and those with fewer than eight care aide responses to the TREC care aide survey) to ensure stability of measures at either the baseline or follow up data collections, we randomly matched a control unit to each intervention unit, based on the unit type: general long-term care versus dementia care unit, number of beds on unit, facility size category (small: <80 beds, medium: eight-120 beds, large: >120 beds), ownership model (for-profit, not-for-profit), and region.Directors of care in charge of each selected home were invited to participate, provided with information about the study, and included if they consented to participate. Homes were provided with $3000 as partial compensation for the time and resources required to participate. Following discussion of trial requirements, Directors of Care were given the task of identifying one care unit within their home to participate in the intervention and to identify staff as members of their SCOPE team.