by Deb Bakerjian PhD, APRN, FAAN, FAANP

Greetings CALTCM Members and Friends!

It has been a while since I last wrote an article for The Wave, so I thought it would be timely to update the membership on the many activities that we have going on at CALTCM.

As most of you know, last year we announced an opportunity for nursing homes to participate in our “Best Practices” call.  We had 17 nursing homes submit proposals, all of which were fabulous!  Our panel of judges were really challenged to select the top five submissions, but after careful consideration and much debate back and forth, we selected five proposals that best met the criteria of the award.  I’m pleased to announce the five who were selected:

These five organizations will be presenting their best practice proposals and any results they have at a special Pre-Conference just prior to our 2016 conference, aptly named “CALTCM 2016: Quality Through Best Practices”. The “Pre-Conference: Best Practices Summit” will showcase these five best practices and CALTCM members will be able to learn how they might implement some of these best practices in their own organizations and vote on their favorite. Attendance at the summit is free but limited, so I encourage you to registration for the conference early.

I also want to recognize the great submissions from the other organizations:  Athena GTX, Berkley Convalescent, Broadway Villa Post-Acute, Care Directives, Carmel Mountain Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center, Chaparral House, Edgemoor DP SNF, Garden Crest Rehabilitation, Idylwood Care Center, SCAN Health Plan and Vienna Nursing and Rehab Center.  The strength of their submissions made the selections challenging and we hope they will all submit a poster so that they can also share their best practices with the membership.

Congratulations to all seventeen organizations who submitted proposals, you are doing great work!

I’m particularly pleased to share that the 2016 Leadership Award is going to Karl Steinberg, MD, CMD!  Many of you know Karl and know that he is an icon in California because of his passion for anything and everything related to improving the quality of life of older adults.  Karl’s leadership has been widespread, everything from providing excellent team care in nursing homes (along with his two dogs Tessa and Josie) to being the Editor in Chief of AMDA’s Caring for the Ages and representing CALTCM in various other state organizations such as the Coalition for Compassionate Care and the California Association of Healthcare Facilities. And, of course, Karl is a Past President of CALTCM and has been on the Executive Committee as one committee chair or another for a decade. Karl, we are grateful for your leadership and proud that you are a member of CALTCM.

I know that many of you took advantage of our FREE webinar “Dementia Care and the Use of Antipsychotics” put on by experts Jay Luxenberg and Janice Hoffman on February 11th!  This was a great presentation and just one more benefit of being a CALTCM member!!  Thank you Jay and Janice for these best practices. There were almost 120 attendees who participated.  We hope to offer other great educational opportunities like this in the future.

Last, but certainly not least, I want to say a bit more about this year’s conference, “CALTCM 2016: Quality through Best Practices”.  For many years, I have been a big supporter of quality improvement as a method of improving care in nursing homes.  This year’s conference continues to highlight quality improvement but from a variety of perspectives and in the form of providing our attendees with “best practices”.  We hope that by presenting a variety of best practices, NHs will be able use them as a basis of their quality improvement efforts. We start off the conference Friday afternoon with three perspectives related to antipsychotic use that is followed with best practices in managing younger psychiatric patients in the SNF.  We then transition to wider issues related to best practices in diagnosing UTIs, identifying potentially inappropriate medications and best practices in management of CKD and end with Be OPTIMISTIC.  

Saturday morning continues best practices with several short presentations on key content, starting with a focus on palliative care. The morning session begins with best practices in palliative care and goes on to incorporate issues related to the POLST and how to have the sometimes challenging “talk” about palliative care with residents and families.  Remember, that starting in January of this year, nurse practitioners and physician assistants are able to sign the POLST – so all of you NPs and PAs, make sure to attend this session so that you understand and can guide discussions around the POLST and Palliative Care best practices.  The remainder of the morning focuses on four additional short topics.  The afternoon transitions to a focus on business practices; value based purchasing, bundled payment models, telehealth and telemedicine, and technology to help reduce admissions. After the break, the focus on technology continues and the afternoon ends with a Panel Discussion.

As we think about the complexity of skilled nursing home care, the changes that have come about over the past several years and those to come in the future, I am reminded that we are living in a time of great transition.  What we did in the past no longer informs what we do in the future; we are learning to live in a new paradigm where we must learn to leverage technology and business practices and system of care so that, together, they result in value for the residents and the payers.  There was a time when many of us worried that quality of care would suffer because of the attention to better business practices, but that does not need to happen.  What needs to happen is that we find ways to reduce costs through identifying waste, by discontinuing practices that don’t work, and by leveraging all of the members of the team to provide high quality care and that we learn to use technology to our advantage.  This is the focus of our conference this year.  I hope to see all of you there so we can continue to learn from each other!!