For the eighth time, Kindred Healthcare has been named by Fortune as one of the World's Most Admired Healthcare Companies. Each year, Fortune partners with Korn Ferry Hay group, a global organizational advisory group.

 

Together they survey top industry minds and leaders, including executives, directors and securities analysts. These industry elites span 680 of the world's highest-revenue companies in 28 countries and across more than 51 industries. Additionally, each company's score must be in the top 50% of the industry survey in order to be listed.

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Results of a recent study showed that burnout among palliative care physicians – those who focus on pain and symptom relief among patients with various diseases and conditions – is extraordinarily high: over 62 percent. The study, which relied on a survey of over 1,200 hospice and palliative care clinicians, also found that 50 percent of palliative care physicians expect to leave the field in the next 10 years. Severity of the burnout seemed to be affected by younger age, having fewer colleagues and working weekends.

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Jane Dailey is Vice President of Clinical Operations, East Region and Southeast Region, in the Hospital Division of Kindred Healthcare. She provided an update on the Cognitive Care pilot in Dallas, starting first by recognizing what she called “an amazing group of people” in the Dallas-Fort Worth integrated care market. The folks who have been working on the pilot “wanted to continue the impact from the 2013 symposium,” Dailey notes. One year later, she says, “we have identified processes across the continuum that will allow us to promptly screen and evaluate patients with cognitive issues.”

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An individualized care plan is critical when helping brain injury patients recover and return home. And it takes a team of specialists to tailor the rehabilitation plan so it addresses both the physical, cognitive, and emotional issues involved.

The brain injury program at Kindred’s Inpatient Rehabilitation Hospitals focuses on helping patients restore function and learn how to do things differently when functions can’t be restored to pre-injury levels. The program combines a multidisciplinary team with the technologies and tools specifically geared toward brain injuries.

In addition to physician specialists, Kindred’s brain injury team includes rehabilitation trained nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, clinical dietitians, neuropsychologists, orthotists, social workers and case managers. The therapists often have extensive training in areas such as Neuro-IFRAH, Neurodevelopmental technique, Vital Stim, and more.

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Have you ever heard the term “bed sore” before? “Bed sore” is another way of saying “pressure ulcer,” a condition that occurs when pressure, with or without friction, builds up in an area of the body, such as the sacrum, coccyx, heels or hips, particularly in an immobile person. Pressure obstructs blood flow to the soft tissue, causing injury to the area. Because pressure ulcers can develop in patients confined to wheelchairs or beds in a hospital or long-term care facility, caregivers must be well trained in preventing pressure ulcers and treating them early and effectively when they do develop. The more advanced a pressure ulcer gets, the harder it is to treat and the longer it may take to heal.

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Kim Warchol has been an Occupational Therapist specializing in dementia for more than 24 years. One minute of listening to her talk about her field and you can hear the years of experience and passion in every word. But she readily admits that she wasn’t prepared to deal with cognitive impairment when she first started practicing.

Her “aha!” moment came through the work of Claudia Kay Allen, MA, OTR/L, FAOTA, which completely changed her perspective from focusing on the limitations of patients with cognitive impairment to focusing on uncovering what they could do. She hasn’t looked back since and, she says, she is no longer “leaving these vulnerable individuals to fend for themselves.”

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Ever wonder what Kindred is doing to take a lead in confronting issues that affect hospitals all over the country, such as alarm fatigue, which happens when too many beeps and buzzes become like background noise to caregivers? The Hospital Division’s Respiratory Care Council is addressing this healthcare challenge as well as others like it. Meeting every other month, the Council’s 21 members – representing each of the regions in which Kindred delivers care, as well as the Support Center in Louisville – strive to identify and share best practices and standardize systems and procedures across the division. They are also working with colleagues from Kindred’s other divisions to achieve enterprise-wide standardization when appropriate.

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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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