Age-appropriate care: a system designed to make it happen.

In 1991, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations governing board standards required that a process be designed to ensure that all individuals responsible for the assessment, treatment, or care of patients are competent in age-appropriate care. To meet this requirement, Humana Hospital-Overland Park in Overland Park, KS, developed a process to educate, evaluate, and report competence of staff to the governing board in an efficient and useful way. The focus of this article is to discuss how the process was developed and implemented successfully.