“The world is our university and everyone you encounter is your teacher. When you wake up each day, make sure you go to school!” With that proclamation, Je’Mone Smith, Division Vice President of Human Resources and Diversity, inspired attendees of this year’s Diversity & Inclusion Symposium to be keenly aware of the ways we can learn from one another every single day.

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Patients, their family members and friends are often overwhelmed during care transitions so we have compiled some frequently asked questions about our transitional care hospitals. Whether you are a patient, loved one or healthcare professional, here are a few things about our transitional care hospitals you should know: Read Full Post

Helping others recognize the signs of a stroke can shorten the time before a person gets treatment, and faster medical treatment can minimize long-term effects or prevent death.

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By, Jessy Draka, Communications Intern

April is Parkinson’s Awareness Month. Muhammad Ali and Michael J. Fox may be familiar people, but how familiar are you with their disease? Many people have misconceptions about Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and education can change that.

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The typical stay at a traditional hospital is five days. At Kindred Transitional Care Hospitals, the length of stay may be measured in weeks, not days. Why? Because we know that not all patients can recover in five days or less. Some have underlying conditions that make illnesses or other conditions harder to treat. Others are still too ill to return home.

At Kindred Hospitals, we offer a range of services to help patients who need additional time to recover, and the length of the stay depends on the needs of the patient. This includes the specialized services of our Subacute Units, where we work with patients who have an acute illness or injury or worsening of a disease but no longer need the aggressive level of care provided in a hospital. We offer short-term comprehensive inpatient medical care and rehabilitation that is designed to get the patient home or to a facility such as a skilled nursing center.

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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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February 9 -15, 2014 is National Cardiac Rehabilitation Week.

It may be time to leave the hospital, but you may not be ready to return directly home after recovering from a heart attack. If you need extra care, your physician may send you to a Kindred Nursing and Rehabilitation Center for our Cardiac Specialty Program. Our services help you transition from hospital to home as quickly and safely as possible, and reduce the likelihood that you’ll need to go back to the hospital.

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When you are injured or ill, you may need rehabilitation services to help in recovery. Rehabilitation helps you improve your body’s functions, but there are different levels of services depending on your medical condition. Our Inpatient Rehabilitation Hospitals (also known as IRFs) are for patients who need a higher level of care and more intense occupational, physical and speech therapy.

Patients in a Kindred Inpatient Rehabilitation Hospital are medically stable, but also need 24-hour nursing care and daily physician oversight. They are considered able to perform at least three hours of therapy a day, five days a week. Our goal is to restore function as fully as possible, and help the patient learn how to do things differently when functions can’t be restored to previous levels.

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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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When 37-year-old Kelly Downing came to Kindred Transitional Care and Rehabilitation – Greenbriar, paralyzed from the neck down as a result of chronic Lyme disease, she was unlike any patient the team had ever seen.

Her occupational therapist, Stacey Irek, has said: “With her diagnosis, there was no textbook we could follow.”

The only one that might come close, they thought, was another Kelly, who had a neurological condition that had also caused neck-down paralysis, and who had been treated at Kindred Rehabilitation Hospital Clear Lake in Webster, Texas.

“Our Kelly’s brother had seen the video on YouTube about Kelly Ford – the so-called ‘Running Mom’ who had lost the ability to walk, paralyzed from the neck down,” Stacey said. “He noted the similarities and they asked us about it.”

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