Karl Steinberg, MD, CMD, Immediate Past President, CALTCM

Almost 100 Californians were registered at the March 7-11 AMDA annual meeting in San Antonio, entitled “A Mission from the Heart,” and our CALTCM members as usual distinguished themselves among the crowd of over 1600 attendees from the U.S., Canada and overseas. Many Californians presented lectures, including our own Rebecca Ferrini (AMDA’s Medical Director of the Year for 2009) and Rob Gibson, both from Edgemoor in Santee. I had the opportunity to address the Saturday general session on behalf of AMDA’s Public Policy Committee, on some of the top LTC policy issues over the past year. I did not wet my pants in front of the huge crowd, thankfully.

The AMDA House of Delegates met for its annual work meeting as well, with the CALTCM delegation representing all California AMDA physician members. (AMDA still only allows physicians on its Board of Directors and voting membership—unlike CALTCM, which embraced all LTC professionals way back in 2000.) Our heartfelt thanks to the 10 CALTCM members listed below who took time out of their meeting schedule and San Antonio fun time to serve as our delegates:

Tim Gieseke
Ray Dann
John Fullerton
Emmet Lee
Laurie Johnston
Mushrik Kaisey
Jim Brinkman
Dawn Groten
Ashkan Javaheri
Karl Steinberg

My esteemed colleague and friend, Dr. Dan Haimowitz of Pennsylvania, presided expertly over the HOD proceedings. (Dr. Haimowitz, who gets extra points from me since he takes a dog to work with him, was recently featured on the cover of Medical Economics, with an award-winning piece he wrote about his ailing dog, Spenser—including parallels to the work we do! I highly recommend reading his essay.

Among the 2012 HOD’s accomplishments were the approval of a thoughtful White Paper compiled by Drs. Dan Bluestein and Patricia Bach on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT) social and health issues in the long-term care setting (available online at www.amda.com). Resolutions on portable X-ray ordering by non-physician practitioners (NPPs), support for a permanent repeal of the sustainable growth rate (SGR), and judicious use of antipsychotic drugs also passed the HOD after some brief discussion. Perhaps the most titillating portion of the meeting came with the contentious debate over a resolution submitted by the Maryland Medical Directors Association, obtusely entitled “TRANSPARENCY AND PATIENT SAFETY IN LONG TERM CARE FOR PROVIDERS WITH DOCTORATE DEGREES.” This resolution, modeled after a similar AMA resolution, would basically require that any clinician with a doctoral degree (e.g., a doctor of podiatry, dentistry, nursing, psychology, chiropractic, etc.) seeing a patient in a skilled nursing facility—if not an M.D. or D.O.—would have to provide full disclosure to the patient of exactly what sort of doctor he or she was. Our delegation had discussed the resolution in advance and felt that it was divisive, unenforceable and unnecessary. A small but vocal minority of delegates in the HOD meeting felt that this resolution was a good idea because of the fact that, when studies have been done, patients often demonstrate a lack of understanding of who their physician is or what the role of other doctors who see them in the LTC setting is. In any event, after some fairly extensive discussion and debate, the resolution went down by a sizeable majority.

On Friday evening, CALTCM hosted a reception for California attendees and friends. Nearly 50 people in total stopped by this event for networking, hors d’oeuvres, and an update on what CALTCM is doing. We are glad to welcome some new members from this gathering, and will be looking forward to seeing many of them at our meeting in May.