Pre-Conference Workshop on INTERACT II Sold Out!
by Debra Bakerjian, PhD, MSN, FNP
originally posted August 2010

The Pre-Conference Workshop on INTERACT II was sold out two weeks before the conference. In fact, we started a waiting list of interested facilities in case anyone dropped out, but none did. A few minutes before starting, I looked about and the room was noisy, the tables crowded already and they kept on coming. Nursing home administrators, directors of nursing, medical directors, directors of staff development, and other key staff sat together at round tables ready to listen to our expert panel of speakers about a topic that is and will continue to be essential to ensuring the safety of residents and will certainly be critical to the financial success of organizations in the future. Interventions to Reduce Acute Care Transfers (INTERACT II) are designed to improve the early identification, assessment, documentation, and communication of changes of condition in residents in order to prevent avoidable hospital transfers. Hospital transfer put our patients at higher risk for morbidity and mortality and cost billions of dollars in unnecessary costs to the healthcare system.

Project Director Joe Ouslander, MD (center), Co-Director Gerri S. Lamb, PhD, RN, FAAN (right), and Project Coordinator Laurie Herndon, GNP/ANP (left) shared their research, knowledge, and the INTERACT II resources with 22 nursing home leadership teams. Then the leadership teams worked with other teams to better understand how to implement the processes and resources in their own nursing homes. At the end of the afternoon, each table shared their successes and lessons learned with everyone and all went home with many ideas of what they wanted to implement back home. CALTCM intends to check in with those leadership groups in about a month to see what kind of progress they are making. We think this group will have a real head start in getting ready for healthcare reform AND we know their residents will benefit from the processes they put in place that are based on the INTERACT II project.

For more information on INTERACT II, please visit: http://interact.geriu.org