CAPABLE … and Then Some
It began in 2009 with a simple idea that came to Sarah Szanton while she was making house calls as a visiting nurse in West Baltimore: helping older adults age in community should increase their well-being and decrease the costs of unnecessary admissions to nursing homes and hospitals. A dozen years later, the program—Community Aging in Place, Advancing Better Living for Elders, or CAPABLE—has helped thousands of older Americans in 45 rural, urban, and suburban sites across 23 states and two countries. It no longer requires NIH support. And some states—Massachusetts, Vermont, and Colorado—support the intervention through their Medicaid programs.
“NIH has been vital to CAPABLE’s creation, development, testing, and dissemination across the country,” said Szanton, now the dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing. “You can think of it like this: A researcher’s idea is like a seed; the university is the ground where the seed is planted; and the NIH provides the water and sunlight to help it grow.”
