Our country now has the distinction of having the most COVID cases in the world.  Our response as a nation is a stress test that has exposed our lack of a coordinated system of health care in this country.  In my community, there remains a shortage of naso-pharyngeal swabs, a public expectation of easy access to testing (County Public Health Department can do 100-120 tests per day), and many facilities still don’t have real-time access to adequate PPE.  Because of the lack of PPE and nasopharyngeal swabs, testing in some facilities for influenza/RSV/Other viruses is not being done. There appears to be an over-reliance on quarantine of residents with respiratory illness as well as shelter-in-place strategy to keep their facilities COVID-naïve.

In the second issue of the WAVE for June this year, I wrote about how to access “AMDA on the Go” podcasts, which are offered free to post-acute and long-term care professionals.  Over the summer, AMDA has added a number of new features including expert discussion from the Colorado Geriatric Journal Club, and now, practical clinical applications from the August issue of JAMDA.  In this podcast, Dr. Philip Sloane, the new co-Editor-in-Chief, summarized take-home lessons from: Increasing the Value of ER visits, Reducing Avoidable Transfers, Quantifying the Impact of Incomplete nursing home transfer documentation, and Measuring the Value of High-Intensity Telemedicine in Senior Living communities.  I found this podcast to whet my appetite for the details of these articles, which I can now more effectively share with my facilities and home health agency.

CALTCM has had a busy 2019, Summer is near and the Leadership and Management in Geriatrics (LMG) course and the Fall Conference will be upon us in no time at all.  We would like to give you a quick update on our current programs and an update on two membership benefits you will not want to overlook – if you are not a member yet, take a few moments and join CALTCM today to be eligible for these opportunities.