Healthcare Systems Meet Family Systems: Improving Healthcare for Older Adults and Their Families

Fellow Clinical Gerontologists, We close out the volume year with good news about Clinical Gerontologist. In 2020, our publisher, Taylor and Francis, we will be adding 15% more pages to our annual page limit. This will allow us to feature even more of the best-applied research, review, and clinical commentary in geriatric behavioral health. We keep close track of what our readers view and cite to help us determine how to continue to shape the journal going forward. Towards that end, I would like to thank all the scholars who contributed to our journal this year and a special thanks to all the professionals who provided such thoughtful and constructive reviews. As diversity in behavioral health is one of our special interests, we were especially glad to devote one of our issues to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) aging in the spring of 2019. In fact, two of our LGBTQ aging papers are among the most commonly cited and viewed. We also note that articles that provide concrete guidance on evolving challenges in mental health assessment or treatment (e.g., assessment tools, treatment protocols) are also widely viewed and cited, so we will continue to feature these resources. We are in the process of working on special issues for 2020 and 2021 including what promises to be an important special issue on Late-Life Suicide. We are currently soliciting papers for a future special issue on cannabis use in Late Life. Finally, we are developing special issues on Late-Life Sexuality and Social Inclusion and Loneliness. In this issue, we continue with our focus on highquality practical reviews and original research. We begin with a review of the International Resident Assessment Instrument (interRAI) as used in home care (Salahudeen &Nishtala, 2019), one of the more comprehensive and painstaking reviews I have seen in recent years. The interRAI is a comprehensive geriatric assessment used in over 30 countries to evaluate care needs, quality, and outcomes across home, acute, long-term, and palliative care settings. Salahudeen and Nishtala provide a highly comprehensive summary of the interRAI as used to measure individual and system-level outcomes, which should be useful for a wide array of clinicians and administrators interested in standardized home care evaluation to promote comparisons across settings and countries. The first original article keeps the focus on health system evaluation in targeting challenges faced by older adults with hearing impairments in health systems. Stevens, Dubno, Wallhagen, and Tucci (2019) present results of a survey of individuals (N = 1,581) with hearing impairments in which they identify three common challenges reported by older patients: (1) hearing one's name called in the waiting room, (2) hearing providers on the telephone, and (3) hearing providers when their backs are turned. Only one-third of the sample said providers accommodated their hearing loss when they provided feedback to providers about that need. This survey is a helpful reminder for behavioral health professionals and those across all disciplines of obstacles to care for those with hearing loss.