LTL Online

NCAL unveils guiding principles for assisted living communities

The National Center for Assisted Living (NCAL) set of Guiding Principles focuses on individual-centered care as the foundation to develop and improve services. NCAL developed the guiding principles to assist providers, residents, family members, and staff in providing quality care and services and promote full disclosure of information to prospective family members and residents.

https://www.iadvanceseniorcare.com/NCALGuidingPrincipals

Elderly patients boarded more than six hours in ED likely go to nursing home after hospital discharge

According to research being presented at the International Conference on Emergency Medicine, April 3-6, 2008, in San Francisco, the long waits in the emergency department increased the probability that an elderly patient would go to a nursing home from the hospital and not to their own home. Researchers say this is most likely attributable to lingering mental confusion.

https://www.iadvanceseniorcare.com/ElderlyInED

Ten million U.S. baby boomers to develop Alzheimer’s disease

According to a new Alzheimer’s Association report, the 2008 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures, the disease is poised to strike one out of eight U.S. baby boomers. Today, as many as 5.2 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s disease, which includes between 200,000 and 500,000 people under 65 years of age with young-onset Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias. Experts predict that by 2010 there will be almost a half million new cases of the disease each year; and by 2050, there will be almost a million new cases each year.

https://www.iadvanceseniorcare.com/AlzheimersReport

I am looking forward to MDS 3.0 as a major improvement:

Reader comments:

I am hoping that it will be more user friendly as well as more concise—thus saving our nurses precious time.

There are too many areas where residents fall through the cracks so to speak, and there are too many gray areas in the current 2.0.

Yes, however, I am not looking forward to the time involved in making all the upfront necessary changes (training, changing processes, etc.).

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Online Exclusive

Update on the Quality Indicator Survey

For a long-term care industry yearning for an alternative—any alternative—to the OBRA state survey system that gives facilities such trouble in terms of consistency, collaborativeness, and fairness, one of the more intriguing changes under way is the Quality Indicator Survey (QIS). The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services initiated the demonstration program in 2005 through a contract with the University of Colorado. Recently Andrew Kramer, MD, who leads the University of Colorado and the Nursing Home Quality teams in QIS, addressed a few commonly asked questions in this exclusive online interview with Long-Term Living Editor-in-Chief Richard L. Peck.

https://www.iadvanceseniorcare.com/QISUpdate

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Blog EFA 2008

The following blog excerpts are from the Environments for Aging conference, March 17-19 at the JW Marriott Starr Pass Resort in Tucson, Arizona. Find full blogs, images, and video of EFA events and contribute your own thoughts at https://www.iadvanceseniorcare.com/BlogEFA.

A walk through a resort-style continuing-care facility

Posted on: 3.17.2008 11:58:18 PM Posted by John Oberlin, Online Editor

About 40 EFA attendees and I went on the afternoon tour of Splendido at Rancho Vistoso, a resort-styled retirement community with 246 independent apartments/villas, 36 skilled nursing units, 12 assisted living apartments, and 12 dementia care units.

The presenters at the facility focused on owner Mather LifeWays’ philosophy of wellness. Wellness at Splendido requires a paradigm shift from paternalistic care to self-directed care, from medical to holistic, from labels like disabled to referring to people as people, and so on. The presenters stressed the importance of designing facilities with this new positive paradigm in mind.

The New Rules for Communicating to Boomers

Posted on: 3.18.2008 9:04:49 PM Posted by John Oberlin, Online Editor

Matt Thornhill, the founder of The Boomer Project, a marketing research and consulting company focusing on baby boomers, gave an informative and entertaining EFA welcome keynote speech this morning on how to market to the next generation of “elderly.” Although, as was Thornhill’s recurring message, the baby boomers will probably never call themselves “elderly.”