On behalf of the judges of this year’s Posters, we say “Wow!” to those who shared their good work with our membership.  This was a fantastic display of efforts to identify and implement best practices at a facility level. (Attached below is a list of the posters that were displayed.)

Our 1st place award went to Joshua Chodosh, MD of UCLA for “Improving Depression Care in Nursing Facilities Using Practice Improvement Education (PIE) Through a Mentored Approach”.  This poster reported the outcome of this strategy used at 6 facilities who volunteered for this project after CALTCM’s workshop on depression 2 years ago.  It is based on reviewing the results of residents’ PHQ-9 depression screening test scores, which are performed with each MDS assessment.

Our 2nd place award went to Rebecca Ferrini, MD, CMD and her team at Edgemoor DP SNF of Santee for “Evaluating depression in those who cannot speak for themselves:   the utility of the PHQ-9 OV”.  This interesting poster actually demonstrated that the PHQ-9 OV was not particularly reliable in assessing depression in nonverbal patients.

Our 3rd place award went to Rebecca Ferrini, MD, CMD and her team for “Streamlining the Process for Recapitulation of Physician Orders”.  In this project, recaps were done every 45 days instead of every 30 days, thereby saving a lot of unnecessary work and not compromising care in any apparent way.

We thank our winners for permitting us to post their poster on CALTCM’s website.

Please join me in congratulating all of our participants.

At CALTCM, we challenge you to consider how your facility might participate in next year’s poster session.