With the goal of improving how long-term care is delivered in the U.S., University of Minnesota School of Public Health (SPH) Associate Professor Tetyana Shippee has recently joined three influential, national organizations focused on long-term care policies and practices.

As a social gerontologist, Shippee’s primary work focuses on quality-of-life measures for people in long-term care settings, as well as the role of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in those settings. Shippee said she is excited about the new appointments and the opportunities they open up to make positive changes in our nation’s long-term care system.

Shippee has been appointed to the following national organizations:

• • The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Technical Expert Panel on Nursing Home Quality. Shippee was selected to serve on this panel, which provides feedback to CMS on the nursing-home-quality metrics that inform the CMS Nursing Home Compare Report Card, a national rating system that makes meaningful distinctions between high- and low-performing nursing homes and gives consumers an easy way to understand nursing home quality. Shippee’s appointment reflects her expertise in both quality-of-life measures for long-term care as well as metrics that take equity into account.

• • The Moving Forward Nursing Home Coalition, where Shippee serves on the Steering Committee and also co-chairs the committee on Person-Centeredness, Culture Change, Care Planning & Quality of Life. In these roles, Shippee is working to implement recommendations from the National Academies of Science and Engineering’s (NASEM) report on improving nursing-home care. Released in 2022, the NASEM recommendations are the first comprehensive study in 35 years to detail the challenges facing U.S. nursing homes. The report examines how our nation delivers, finances, regulates, and measures the quality of nursing home care, with particular emphasis on challenges that arose around the COVID-19 pandemic.

• • The Gerontological Society of America (GSA), where Shippee is Chair-elect of the Section on Social Research, Policy and Practice. The GSA is the nation’s oldest and largest interdisciplinary organization devoted to research, education, and practice in the field of aging. As chair-elect of the section, Shippee is helping lead GSA’s efforts to study social, economic, health, and long-term care policies and the related programs that affect older adults.

In addition, Shippee is also chairing the search for a new Editor-in-Chief of Public Policy and Aging Report, a GSA journal that focuses on the role of policy for aging.