I know that sometimes I must sound like a broken record, but an incident in a Vermont nursing facility underscores why it is so important for nursing personnel to actively manage patient interactions. In Bennington, Vermont an 84-year-old woman suffering from dementia walked into the room of a 58-year-old man. The man was heard yelling, and ...

 The recruitment period of the Phase 2 Advancing Excellence in America's Nursing Homes Campaign ended at midnight January 31, 2010. The Campaign signed up. 5,860 nursing homes, including 1,132 new participants and 4,728 re-enrollees (now charter members of the Campaign), are now members of the Phase 2 Campaign, reports Carol Benner, ScM. ...

It is no surprise to anyone who works in health care that census is always a critical issue for long-term care facilities. This especially is an important focus for many skilled nursing care facilities. As more assisted living facilities are now taking many residents that at one time was the purview of nursing facilities, many nursing ...

What do you enjoy the most about a meal?  Is it the taste of the food, conversation with others or the ambiance?  What is the meal time experiences like for our residents?  Do they eat off of hospital like trays alone in their rooms or do they get to sit with others and enjoy a variety of their favorite foods?  If you are ...

I thought I would confess one of the strategies I employ in dealing with difficult-to-acquire capital items, something I call ''creative accounting.''  As all of my experience has been in behavioral health operations, it was always been clear to me that providing the best equipment for the mentally ill has never been a priority in most ...

Over the summer I made a major purchase at a home improvement retailer. To make a long story short, the vendor: lost my order data due to a computer power failure, delayed product delivery, ordered the wrong size product, forgot to collect payment from me while I was in the store (which meant I had to make an extra trip to the store), allowed the ...

Long-term care organizations must continue to achieve high quality patient care and positive patient outcomes without increasing costs. One consequence of this reality is the development of care delivery models using ''nursing substitutes'' or unlicensed assistive personnel (UAP).  While these health care workers fill the void created ...

In my last post on Sara Gruen's book ''Water for Elephants,'' I discussed the book's main character, 93-year-old Jacob, who lives in a long-term care facility. In the chapter where Jacob recounts his family's decision to send him to the facility, he says the dialogue between him and his children went like this: ''It's not a nursing home, they ...