{"doi":"10.1093/ppar/prac031","title":"Three Decades of Research Guiding Policy and Policy Guiding Research: Academic Efforts Concerning Aging and Public Policy","abstract":"Ten days after Hurricane Irma struck Florida in 2017 with the power to knock out electrical service nearly statewide and prompt millions of people to evacuate, Dr. Kathryn Hyer sat before Senator Susan Collins’ Special Senate Committee on Aging. A professor in the School of Aging Studies at the University of South Florida (USF), she urged the panel to pay more attention to the effects of disasters on older adults, require greater oversight of disaster planning in long-term care, and invest more in geriatric education (Disaster Preparedness and Response, 2017). Her statement reflected more than a decade of research that began with a string of hurricanes that traversed Florida in the summer of 2004 and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which devastated parts of Louisiana and Texas in 2005. This work linked the USF School of Aging Studies and health service researchers at Brown University on a National Institute on Aging–funded grant that aimed to examine what happens to residents of nursing homes (NHs) in the path of a major hurricane. Among their findings: these residents are more likely to die or be hospitalized in the weeks and months after a hurricane, even up to 90 days afterward, and their risks are greater if they are evacuated (Dosa et al., 2012). As the results developed, the researchers began a parallel effort to translate the findings for policy and practice. With a grant from the John A. Hartford Foundation, they convened a series of hurricane summit meetings to connect private long-term care representatives with federal, regional, and state policy-makers and state and federal emergency management personnel (Hyer, Brown, et al., 2010). Among them were the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security. Over time, new government regulations and guidelines emerged to bolster disaster planning and responses in NHs nationally. As part of the Hartford-funded work, the USF/Brown research team collaborated further with long-term care leaders to produce disaster preparedness recommendations (Florida Health Care Association, 2008), including a plain-language model to aid in the decision of whether to evacuate or shelter in place (see Figure 1). To be sure, these researchers were not the only ones to examine the effects of disasters among older adults after Hurricane Katrina (Pierce et al., 2017). However, they were unique in their explicit focus on disseminating the policy and practice lessons of their research. A decision model of the key internal and external factors for long-term care facilities to consider when assessing whether to evacuate or shelter in place for a hurricane. This policy focus at USF goes back at least 30 years, to the creation of the Florida Policy Exchange Center on Aging (FPECA). The Florida Legislature established the FPECA as an independent center in 1992 to conduct research and policy analyses on critical topics in aging, with Larry Polivka as director. Dr. Polivka actively promoted initiatives to rebalance long-term care funding so that older adults could more easily receive Medicaid-funded services at home, and potentially delay their transition to a NH. The center also played a key research and advisory role in landmark state legislation to increase state staffing requirements for NHs (Polivka et al., 2003). Though the Florida bill was a compromise that included curbs on lawsuits against NHs, and the new staffing requirements were delayed (Hyer et al., 2009), later research led by Dr. Hyer found that staffing did rise in Florida’s NHs after passage of the bill in 2001, and the increases were associated with increased quality in Florida’s NHs (Hyer et al., 2011). This policy focus at USF goes back at least 30 years, to the creation of the Florida Policy Exchange Center on Aging (FPECA). The Florida Legislature established the FPECA as an independent center in 1992 to conduct research and policy analyses on critical topics in agin","journal":"Public Policy & Aging Report","year":2022,"id":296256,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9542,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":371444,"name":"Lindsay Peterson","orcid":"0000-0003-1129-0931","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":16,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:31:16.555318Z","pmid":"36873957","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}