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.
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 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
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
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. 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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