CALTCM Members and Friends, As we greet 2019 with fresh ideas and educational programs, offering you the best one can offer in professional education and training for California’s post-acute and long-term care (PALTC) arena, I am proud to share with you our accomplishments in 2018.
Our board and its committees have embarked on a forward-thinking strategic planning process. The plan is a work in progress, guided by an expert in the field of charitable and nonprofit organizations. Our education committee has developed an innovative curriculum following a through needs assessment, targeting the areas of opportunity in the California PALTC space and heeding participants’ comments from the past. Future programs have all been designed with the adult learner in mind.
We have conducted five events in our renowned Leadership and Management in Geriatric Medicine (LMG) program. We continued to offer the traditional program, which celebrated its 16th anniversary in 2018, and which has been targeting clinicians from all practice settings seeking to advance to a leadership position. LMG has become an offering for clinical scholars from the VA, attracting clinicians from other states. A unique feature of this program is post-course mentorship and Maintenance of Certification (MOC) credits approved by ABIM.
In 2018 we also started offering LMG-NH, a new curriculum targeting leadership teams of SNFs in California. So far we have trained about 300 clinicians and nursing home administrators in this new curriculum, which emphasizes leadership issues specific to SNFs and other LTC settings. This experience afforded our faculty the opportunity to expand into this space, which has been traditionally reactive to clinical innovation and leadership issues. Under the guidance of CALTCM President Michael Wasserman, who spearheaded this initiative, we were able to introduce a whole new approach to leadership teams from 75 nursing homes, emphasizing the need for clinical excellence as a key to business success.
CALTCM’s celebrated SNF 2.0® program has marked another milestone, completing training at 11 nursing homes in the UCLA post-acute network in Santa Monica and West L.A. This experience has been particularly rewarding to us. It has demonstrated that our approach to training a community of providers in a particular geography really works. The project’s success was due to close collaboration with Michelle Eslami MD, Director for LTC Services, UCLA, and Naveen Raja MD, UCLA Population Health Director. The programmatic guidance by Dr. Albert Lam and logistic support by Barbara Hulz, CALTCM Manager, were invaluable.
Last but not least, CALTCM offered two statewide meetings, one in Los Angeles in the spring and one in Northern California in the fall. I am pleased to acknowledge Deborah Wolff-Baker, GNP and the California Chapter of GAPNA, our partner for the planning of the Northern California event; this event attracted about 70 participants. Thanks to Deb Bakerjian, PhD and the UC Davis School of Nursing for allowing us to use their state of the art learning center for this event.
I will be remiss if I forget to acknowledge our CALTCM management team, Barbara Hulz, General Manager and Multiple Projects Director, and Craig Jaffe, CALTCM’s recently recruited Program Coordinator, who are the ones responsible for the production of this monumental effort and bringing to it to fruition.
My thanks go also to the CALTCM BOD and Education Committee, who spent many hours planning and supporting our work.
All the best!
Dan Osterweil MD, FACP, CMDCEO CALTCM