HealthCap would like to congratulate the 2018 Bronze, Silver and Gold AHCA/NCAL Quality Award applicants.  The quality journey is an ongoing process of evaluation and a commitment to achieving success.  Communities who have enjoyed success “live” the Baldrige criteria on a daily basis, everything done within the community is evaluated against this criteria and when necessary, systems are “re-created”.  This may seem like a daunting task but as the old adage says “if it was easy everyone would have it”.  Submitting an application for the Quality Awards is the first step on this journey. It is an exhaustive, interdisciplinary process and we appreciate the efforts!

Well, you aren’t alone! Providers all over the country have been focusing on reducing the number of re-hospitalizations! And what a great goal to have, right? The problem we encounter is that we can’t seem to get a handle on the “why” and the “how” to prevent them.

Long ago and far away nursing centers provided care for frail, elderly patients. There were no IVs, TPN, Cpaps, peritoneal dialysis, active shooters or emergency evacuations. Our biggest threat back then was probably scabies! Those were the days where we “hunkered down”, took what hits us, brushed ourselves off and moved on. Today we are much more enlightened and we should all be thankful for that!

As we continue to soldier through the process of preventing unnecessary re-hospitalizations and nosocomial infections, AHCA/NCAL has partnered with Brown University’s Center for Gerontology to involve members in a proposed study that seeks to evaluate if enhanced environmental cleaning will reduce the rate of infection among patients in skilled nursing centers and ultimately reduce hospitalizations.

The National Pressure Ulcer Advisory Panel (NPUAP) in collaboration with Creighton University Health Sciences Continuing Education, recently hosted a webinar on Considerations for Bariatric Patients in Pressure Injuries and Wound Care. This program focused on the “how” and “why” we do what we do when caring for residents with a diagnosis of obesity as their needs often differ.

It is amazing how quickly we turned from winter to spring this year! The sun is out in the Midwest which is a rare sight in the month of February but we aren’t complaining! With spring upon us we are looking at day light savings time and “springing forward” in a few weeks. For many of us this means a loss of an hour of sleep, for others it means gaining an hour of golf at the end of the day. Whatever it means to you, have you considered what it means to your residents with cognitive loss?

One of the biggest areas of concern and risk DONs face nationwide is the difficulty of recruiting and retaining quality, compassionate long-term caregivers. It can be demoralizing to bring in the “perfect” employee, spend weeks training them, and then have them leave for a position at a neighboring home.

CMS also understands the impact of staff instability, and they are focusing on this area from a quality perspective. Because the more familiar our caregivers are with the residents, the better the care will be.