Nurses Treating Elderly At Home Can Integrate Depression Care

Among older home health care patients, depression is highly prevalent, is often inadequately treated, and contributes to hospitalization and other poor outcomes. Feasible and effective interventions are needed to reduce this burden of depression.

The objective of the study is to determine whether, among older Medicare Home Health recipients who screen positive for depression, patients of nurses receiving randomization to an intervention have greater improvement in depressive symptoms during 1 year than patients receiving enhanced usual care.

This cluster randomized effectiveness trial conducted at 6 home health care agencies nationwide assigned nurse teams to an intervention (12 teams) or to enhanced usual care (9 teams).

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