HomePlanning for Change

Planning for Change

Senior-friendly change is a slow, incremental, accretive process – not a single decision or act but a long process of quality improvement, adding one change at a time which slowly over ten years has made a big difference. There is no one single best solution! Just start making changes that prioritize the needs of older people and your staff’s needs to provide care to older people.

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  • 10 Tips on Implementing a Consistent Screening and Assessment Approach for Geriatric Care

    Implementing consistent screening and assessment requires careful planning, resource allocation, and modification of existing work practices to achieve its intended benefits. Before you consider how ...Read More

    Geriatric Emergency Medicine Guidelines: rationale

    Geriatric Emergency Medicine Guidelines After two years of consensus-based work, the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP), the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM), the American ...Read More

    Top 10 articles on the Geriatric Emergency Department

    In Emergency Departments, we tend to follow the evidence to make practice change. However when creating a geriatric ED, the evidence sometimes is lacking:  adopting or adapting “best practices&...Read More

    A CEO’s Story

    On December 6th, I met Joseph Mapa, former CEO of the Sinai Health System. He was at the head of this hospital when the Senior-Friendly Emergency Department story started. I was initially planning to...Read More

    A Senior-Friendly ED Checklist

    A. Staffing A physician champion or medical director with some focussed education specifically relevant to the provision of emergency care of older people should be identified by administration. An i...Read More

    Quality Improvement Metrics

    Here are some outcome measures you might want to consider in tracking your quality improvement activities relating to senior-friendly care. The ED should track metrics for structures, processes, and ...Read More

    A Rationale for a “Hold Overnight” Policy for Frail Older Patients

    The Rationale Older patients often have non-specific presentations that raise complex medical and psychosocial questions relating to etiology and safe disposition. Falls and changes in behavior, such...Read More

    Starting Senior-Friendly Change

    How did this idea of a senior-friendly emergency department get started? DON: An awareness that older patients are part of the core business of EDs – the three main groups that MDs/hospitals have alw...Read More

    Geriatric ERs Reduce Stress, Medical Risks for Elderly Patients

    NEW YORK – The Mount Sinai Hospital emergency room looks and sounds like hundreds of others across the country: Doctors rush through packed hallways; machines beep incessantly; paramedics wheel stret...Read More

    Nurse-Led Geriatric Case Management – the GEM Nurse Role

    For more about GEM, visit the Regional Geriatric Program of Toronto’s Geriatric Emergency Management website. This post is modified from material provided by the Regional Geriatric Programme of...Read More

    Just the Basics: Policies, Procedures & Protocols

    Here is a list of potential improvements you could make in any ED to make it more senior-friendly. Start with the easy ones (on no budget) and progress from there. Where there are examples on this si...Read More

    Just the Basics: Physical Environment & Equipment

    Here is a checklist of basic changes and enhancements that can be done with minimal expenditure or changes. The easy ones are first; the harder, more expensive ones are later Equipment and Supplies E...Read More