MDS Alert

Published on Fri Feb 21, 2014 PDF

Check Out This New LTC-Focused CDC Website

If you’re looking for expert information and resources to help prevent infections in your facility, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has a new website geared toward long-term care (LTC) providers.

The website (www.cdc.gov/longtermcare) is geared toward those staff and residents at nursing homes and assisted living facilities, reported Evvie Munley, senior health policy analyst for Washington, DC-based Leading Age, in a Jan. 24 announcement. The site offers clinical staff resources, as well as information for residents and their family members.

You can take advantage of the CDC’s prevention tools, which include links to:

• Advancing Excellence in America’s Nursing Homes Campaign’s C. difficile Infection Prevention Assessment Checklists;
• Long-Term Care Infection Prevention Toolkit;
• CDC’s C. difficile Toolkit;
• Carbapenem-Resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) Toolkit;
• Norovirus Toolkit;
• MRSA Toolkit; and
• Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infection (CAUTI) Toolkit.

You can also use the website to access the infection tracking system for LTC facilities in the CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network, Munley noted. And access links to other LTC-focused CDC resources on topics such as viral hepatitis, influenza outbreak, tuberculosis infection control, addressing falls, and much more. 

Your Facility Could Be The ‘Least Restrictive’ Environment For Many Residents

Discharging to the community does not improve quality of life for many nursing home residents. So says the February 2014 issue of The Gerontologist.

The journal tackles the topic of “Transforming Nursing Home Culture: Evidence for Practice and Policy” through nine papers in a supplemental issue. And in a commentary entitled, “Implications for Policy: The Nursing Home as Least Restrictive Setting,” the authors challenge the idea that discharging into the community is the best way to improve nursing home residents’ quality of life.

The authors are Robyn Stone, executive director of the Leading Age Center for Applied Research, and Christine E. Bishop, professor of labor economics at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management.

“Stone and Bishop maintain that a residential setting offering 24-hour licensed nursing care may still be the least restrictive environment for some older adults and persons with disabilities, even if residents receive substantial personal assistance,” Leading Age’s Geralyn Magan wrote in a Jan. 22 announcement. What is most important is how the nursing home’s environment functions for individual residents.

Link: You can access the paper abstracts for The Gerontologist at http://gerontologist.oxfordjournals.org/content/54/Suppl_1.toc.