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 ...

Although I am a veteran of both the US Air Force and the US Army, I don't consider myself a hero. I never saw action. I never had people shoot at me. I never did anything but the duty I was given. However, my parent's generation certainly did. My father, who has now passed, flew B-19s over Germany in World War II. He was so ...

The following is a guest blog from Anthony Cirillo:  I returned from the National Council on Aging conference somewhat dismayed. While the conference is not necessarily about long-term care, you would have thought that it did not exist at all when listening to the speakers. Most of the topics were about aging in place and care options in the ...

In reaction to the passage of health care reform legislation, Jack Cassell, MD, a urologist in Orlando, Fla., posted a sign on the door of his practice that read, ''If you voted for Obama...seek urologic care elsewhere. Changes to your healthcare begin right now, not in four years.'' Last Friday, Alan Colmes, a liberal political ...

Gay elders face more problems than their straight peers, including stigma, isolation and unequal treatment, according to a report presented Wednesday at the annual conference of the National Council on Aging and the American Society on Aging in Chicago, and later reported on the CNN Web site. A 2001 study by the U.S. ...

This week I would like to take a moment to say hello to some people who do not know me or the local legal professionals where they work. These are the thousands of facility operators, managers, administrators, nurses and clinicians who operate nursing facilities that not only comply with the law, but go beyond the minimum standards imposed by ...

A week ago, the Bush administration published the names of 131 nursing homes with poor inspection records and said some were already showing signs of improvement, according to the Associated Press. The list, released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, represents troubled facilities cited as a ''special focus facility,'' a term ...

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 ...

End of life care is a difficult subject. It finally has a thorough and appropriate treatment. End-of-Life Communication in the ICU, A Global Perspective, edited and co-written by David W. Crippen, MD, is an excellent treatise on what goes on in the end-of-life jungle. I say this not because I contributed a chapter to this work, but ...

Yesterday, after two days without power, I returned home to find my home in darkness, with the temperature hovering at 43 degrees. A massive ice storm broke trees like dried spaghetti, and cut power to over 44,000 homes in the Jefferson City, Mo. area. (See attachment at the bottom of this post for a photo of iced trees) When I went to the ...