AHCA/NCAL Gero Nurse Prep – Page 40 – News, updates, tips and more

Certified Nurses Improve Facility Quality

Training for gerontological certification turns out to be a win-win proposition for nurses, administrators, and residents.

Registered nurse (RN) staff are in a unique position to affect quality in long term care settings at the bedside and to influence the care delivered by both individual staff members and the team as a whole.

RN staff in long term care settings need to have well-focused clinical assessment and judgment skills, as they are usually the primary assessor of the patient. Medical support is not always immediately accessible, so the nursing staff must analyze clinical situations and have the confidence to make decisions concerning when residents need additional care.

Celebrate! March 19th is Certified Nurses Day!

Please view our handy recertification check list at: Recertification Flyer – Click Here

or Click the below HTML link- http://app1.unmc.edu/gerotest/images/GNPToolkit/InformationalMaterial/RecertificationFlyer.pdf

National Recognition to GeroNursePrep Contributing Faculty

Dr. Joyce Black, Associate Professor at the UNMC College of Nursing, and faculty contributor to Gero Nurse Prep, was recently recognized for both clinical and advocacy expertise.

Dr. Black was awarded the Thomas Stewart Founder’s Award at the National Pressure Ulcer Advisory Panel Biennial Conference in recognition of her significant contributions in furthering pressure ulcer public policy. Dr. Black can be heard in the Module 7 presentation on Integument. Way to go, Dr. Black!

Rest Home Article – USA Today

You Need to Know The Financial and Quality Factors Driving Long Term Care. The CMS has implemented new quality rating standards that have immediate effects on your organization.

Nursing Home

Read the article taken from USA today on February 20, 2015 linked here to see what information is being given to the general public about this event that is greatly impacting your specialty.

Read more here: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/02/20/cms-nursing-home-ratings-lowered/23732385/
We’d love to hear your reaction to the story linked above.

Distinguished GeroNursePrep Alumn!

Nurses! We have a very distinguished GNP alumn who has recently been featured in Provider Magazine for her research on decubiti prevention! Dr.Rosalind Wright, RN-BC, DNP, RAC-CT, CNHA, has more than 30 years of leadership experience in long term care, acute care, and academia.

Wright serves as vice president of quality management for VMT Long Term Care Management and administrator of Unique Residential Care Center, a 230-bed skilled nursing facility, in Washington, D.C. She successfully administered her facility to a Five-Star nursing home rating from CMS.

Read all about her amazing project by clicking this link: Project: Zero Tolerance For Pressure Ulcers

Caring for Patients with Alzheimer’s

By Heidi Keeler

It is important to remember that Alzheimer’s patients have functioning thought patterns, but that they often lose the capacity to communicate effectively with people.

Patients with Alzheimer

Take a look at this amazing effort to communicate with a patient, using long term memories of songs and physical communication. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yYkoTkrcwQ

Europe Struggles With High Antipsychotic Rates, Study Finds

We are engaged in a battle to reduce the unnecessary use of antipsychotics to control behavior in our long term care facilities, favoring the use of behavioral interventions instead. Turns out that our struggles in this effort are not unique to the United States.

antipsychotic

Nearly two out every five European elders who suffer from dementia are being given antipsychotic drugs, a new study has found. Click HERE to read more.

The issue of sexual orientation is of growing concern

Care practices will have to be reevaluated based on the increasing number of openly homosexual adults, particularly as they age.

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Image source: www.newsdiscovery.com

Gay marriage has been legalized by thirty two states and District of Columbia. President Obama, once a adversary of same-sex marriage now believe that “The Constitution’s equal protection clause should protect all marriages, gay or straight”.

DuVall says “He is glad to see so many advocates take on the problem of anti-gay discrimination head on”.

Rating the Ratings

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Medicare has revised the 5 start rating system which is used to evaluate nursing home performance. The reason for revising rating system is that the system does not do anything fruitful. An Investigation piece in the New York Times shed some light on the difference between reality and rating. Ratings were positioned on the basis of annual health inspections and on 2 measures reported by the nursing home itself. The revised rating system will introduce external audits of nursing home quality and electronically submitted staffing data, as well as by incorporating some new measures such as the proportion of residents taking antipsychotic medications, hopes to overcome the shortcomings of the existing rating approach.

There are now so many rating agencies, using very different rating scales. The key point is that single grade cannot grasp all features of medical facility’s performance that are suitable to all the group, individual and organization whom the ratings are designed.

So will the revised ratings of nursing homes (coming in January, 2015) make grades meaningful?

Modernizing Medicare

The Medicare Modernization Act of 2004 didn’t really modernize Medicare.It is really important to have coverage for prescribed drugs, which is a huge support for older individuals. Medicare was pretty much complete apart from this one change, albeit most important one.The problem with the approach which turns 40 this year is that most of the illness are critical requires hospitalization.
Today, most illness is long-lasting illness costliest patients typically have multiple chronic conditions.The good news is that JAMA this week entitled “Optimizing health for persons with multiple chronic conditions,” is that Medicare has made a number of changes that move the program into the modern world.
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Read more: http://blog.drmurielgillick.com/2014/08/modernizing-medicare.html