I once heard a quote from Confucius, and it has stuck with me throughout my career as a case manager at Kindred: “The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential…these are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence.” I tweaked it a little, as people sometimes do, so it really applied to my own life; that desire to succeed is not only for me personally, but also on behalf of the patients I work with each day.

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When someone suffers a traumatic brain trauma — whether it’s from an automobile accident, severe stroke or other injury — he or she is initially admitted to an Intensive Care Unit. After patients are medically stable, it may be necessary to transfer them to a long-term acute care or transitional care facility before an acute rehabilitation or subacute rehabilitation facility.

According to Terry Eberly, a speech pathologist at Kindred Hospital Denver, two assessment methods are used to determine the extent of the injury and issues that need to be addressed:

Based on the results of the evaluation, a plan is customized to the needs of the individual, encompassing and integrating therapies to treat respiratory, speech, motor, visual, orthopedic and other identified issues.

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Kindred’s Transitional Care Hospitals play a vital role in the recovery process for the sickest and most medically complex patients who require aggressive medical care and rehabilitation over a longer period of time. For patients who have complex ventilator needs, multi-organ system failure or complicated medical problems that are very difficult to treat, transitional care hospitals may represent the first important step necessary to make recovery and return home possible.

These hospitals are licensed as general acute hospitals, often featuring such familiar elements as Intensive Care Units (ICUs), operating rooms and on-site laboratory and radiology services, but they also are distinguished by an additional Medicare certification that recognizes the need for extended recovery periods.

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Watch Kelly's inspirational story of hope, healing and recovery. Kelly, a 37 year old wife, teacher and mother of two gradually lost feeling in her legs and then woke up one day paralyzed from her neck down. Kelly's doctor sent her to Kindred Transitional Care and Rehabilitation – Greenbriar to see if rehabilitation therapy could help her condition improve. With Kelly's positive attitude and the dedicated staff at Greenbriar, she was able to walk again. This story, with video of Kelly during her therapy takes place from December of 2012 through March of 2013.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JIvgARQ7n4

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and keeping patients on the road to recovery at the highest level of function possible. As such, Kindred works with chronic-acute patients before they’re discharged to anticipate concerns they might have after they leave and to educate them about medicine management, wound care, follow-up care, caregiver issues and other aspects of their disease process.

“If patients don’t understand what’s happening to them, they panic and bounce back to the hospital,” says Beth Hock, Chief Clinical Officer, Kindred Hospital Dayton and 2013 President’s Award Winner. “Kindred nurses constantly talk about what they’re doing as another way of training patients about their condition.”

Kindred Hospital Dayton also recently took patient education to a whole new level with a 48-year-old woman who suffered a spinal injury that left her a ventilator-dependent quadriplegic.

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Knowing the signs and symptoms of a stroke is always important, but since May is Stroke Awareness Month, it seems like a good time for a reminder. A stroke occurs when blood flow to the brain is cut off, resulting in lack of oxygen and other nutrients. Some areas of the brain can die, which results in loss of function.

 

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Transitional Care Hospitals (TCHs) offer aggressive, medically complex care, intensive care and short-term rehabilitation.

Certified as long-term acute care hospitals and licensed as acute care hospitals, Transitional Care Hospitals are unique in their ability to care for critically ill patients who require specialized and goal-directed care over an extended recovery time. They have an additional Medicare certification that supports a length of stay measured in weeks as compared to the typical five-day stay for patients in traditional hospitals. At Kindred, about two-thirds of our TCH patients have Medicare.

TCH patients require an average length of stay of 25-30 days, and have many co-existing medical conditions, some acute and some chronic. Examples of some of the services TCH patients require are:

Some of the conditions commonly seen in a TCH are:

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The Bird ventilator, named for inventor Forrest Bird, was the first mass-produced mechanical vent, and it used compressed air technology and required no electrical power. Dr. Bird spoke at Kindred’s 2009 Clinical Impact Symposium, and signed the vent that is pictured and on display in the Kindred Support Center lobby.

Known by some as the “father of mechanical ventilation,” Dr. Bird tested his first mechanical ventilators by piloting his own planes to medical schools and asking doctors for access to their sickest patients. Patients who had tried all the available options and were expected to die of cardiopulmonary disease.

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Kindred Healthcare's commitment to our patients is to provide hope, healing and recovery and that means committing to using the latest technologies in pulmonary rehabilitation. Please take a moment to answer the polls and check back next week when we give you the full story on these two important advances in pulmonary rehab. In the meantime, scroll down to the comments and share your experience with these important pieces of history.

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With February being Heart Month, and knowing that heart disease is one of the readmission penalty diagnoses, I paid attention when I recently read a study in Annals of Internal Medicine from investigator Janet Prvu Bettger and collaborators from Duke and Wake Forest.[i] This study looked at the role of transitional care interventions in patients who had recently suffered a heart attack or stroke. The question was legitimate:  what interventions around transitions work to improve outcomes? What they found was sobering.

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