Cathie Brady and Barbara Frank founded B&F Consulting in 2004. Our mission is to help long term care communities be better places to live and work.

The three pillars of our work include:

• Work directly with individual nursing homes, so we are grounded in today’s reality

• Partner with state and national efforts to amplify the spread of our work

• Aim to no longer be needed because our clients can take the work and run with it

Our Method

Long term care work is so tough and challenging that most practitioners don’t have time to step back and reflect on where they are and where they are going. We help our clients to reflect, and generate active learning–where they learn by their experiences.  The process of improvement is an iterative process of discovery and small trials, spreading what works, and ingraining the gains.

We go through a discovery process with each client to find exactly what they need, and how to build on their strengths to get there. We guide clients to do their own discovery, through discussions with front line staff, residents, and families, so they can leverage their strengths to make the needed improvements. We have generally found a wide gap exists between what leadership and clinicians know about residents’ needs and what front line staff, who have intimate day to day knowledge of the resident, understand about what is needed.

We help leaders implement systems to bridge this gap. With these systems, leaders can harvest the crucial information and ideas front-line staff have. With well-functioning systems in place for daily communication between front line staff and clinical leaders, organizations can successfully take on any area of improvement.