Prominent geriatrician Dr. Cheryl Phillips, immediate past president of the American Geriatrics Society, past president of the American Medical Directors Association, and now senior vice president for advocacy at LeadingAge (previously known as the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging), will be gracing CALTCM annual meeting attendees with a keynote address on Saturday morning, May 12, 2012, on the notion of engaged leadership in long-term care. The whole Saturday program will focus in on risk management, to include discussion of the top ten deficiencies cited by the Department of Public Health and review of common themes in elder abuse lawsuits in the long-term care setting. Communication techniques will be reviewed, and assessment of decisional capacity using the U-CARE algorithm will be demonstrated by Drs. Rebecca Ferrini and Robert Gibson Ph.D., JD.

Dr. Deb Bakerjian will provide additional information about the Quality Assessment and Performance Improvement (QAPI) process, building on Dr. Phillips’ presentation—then several CALTCM facilitators will lead attendees in their own individualized action planning session, which can pertain to risk management, pain, or sleep (our three highlighted topic areas for this year’s meeting). Before lunch on Saturday, individuals and teams will work on their action plans. Then we will break for lunch and the annual membership meeting, including the awards for our poster presentations. The afternoon sessions will then open with presentation and feedback on some attendees’ action plans.

Several renowned health care attorneys with decades of long-term care litigation experience will be returning to share their expertise with our attendees on Saturday, including Bill Wilson, Randy Walton and Bryan Reid. The afternoon will wrap up with a perennial favorite, an abbreviated “mock trial” highlighting an elder abuse case. We hope to have plenty of time for the Q&A session following this presentation, and a total of two hours has been devoted to the wrap up session.

The long-term care setting is clearly a highly regulated, highly litigated arena. We at CALTCM feel that quality of care should be maximized to benefit the patients we serve, and that as a natural result of improving quality, there will be less exposure to administrative, regulatory and civil liability. Please attend and bring your entire team to improve your care processes, take home some practical and real-life action plans to benefit your residents, and reduce your risk in the process.