Category: Health Care

Medstar to Cover the Health Center

Collington CEO, Ann Gillespie, and Collington COO, Megan Barbour, announced on January 7 that the MedStar Center for Successful Aging will be overseeing ALL health care at Collington by April 2022. MedStar’s Dr. George Taler will be Collington’s Medical Director for the campus. The MedStar Clinic at Collington Team: Dr. Pinky Singh, NP Caroline Shirima, Maracca Snowden and Lawanda Charles, will remain.

Dr. Taler is a clinical Geriatrician and one of the founding fathers of the MedStar House Call Program at Washington Hospital Center and Vice President Medical Affairs of MedStar Home Health.  He received his MD and residency training at University of Maryland- Baltimore and completed a clinical fellowship in Geriatrics at Parker Geriatric Institute in Hyde Park New York. He is also a Professor of Medicine at Georgetown University School of Medicine. He has received several “Best Doctor” awards over the years.

This an expansion of Medstar’s relationship with Collington to include Assisted Living, Skilled Nursing, and Memory Care in the Creighton Health Center as well as the current Medstar Clinic for Independent Living at Collington.  A critical component of this model is continuity of care. Collington’s 2018-2023 Strategic Plan includes goals focused on transforming our model of care and service away from a “siloed” approach, where a transition through the continuum is disjointed, to a more integrated, seamless experience.

The Medstar expansion will replace the Adfinitas team: Dr. Jennifer Riedinger, Dr. Cecilia Kim, and Physician Assistant Erin McEnany, that provided care in the Health Center and previously, the Clinic.

Collington Residents Make Masks

Contributed by Susan Wolf

With covid-19 creating a shortage of face masks, an appeal has gone out to our residents:  We need for 400 masks for our staff to use!  So far we have a stalwart crew of 8 people (and maybe more) doing their best to meet this urgent need.  Some are sewing by machine and others are sewing by hand.

People have raided long-neglected fabric stashes, sacrificed sheets, and donated hand-made ties, elastic, and ribbon.  As of Sunday we have donated 55 completed masks, with more coming soon.

 

Moving Modern Geriatrics to Take Advantage of Nurse, Family and Patient Intuitions

As our strategic plan moves forward in the health area, we are given a useful reminder in the New York Times of the value of instinct in alerting people to potential medical crises.  The Times article focus on the instincts of nurses, and is fascinating.  I have done a blog that asks if we can also take value from the intuitions of the family and the patient themselves

I suspect that we could “train” patients and families to be much more mindful about patient monitoring, including how to trust their instincts and how to communicate their feelings to the medical personal.  This, of course, should be accompanied by training of medical staff on how to take the most advantage of, and how to solicit such communications.  It is not hard to construct model ways of doing so.

I suspect that when things work, that is very much happening in our long term care facility already.  Nurses and care staff know the patients, and communicate with them regularly.  It makes such sense to empower them to raise their concerns, to train and encourage family and resident to do so too, and finally to ensure that all medical personnel not only listen to, but affirmatively seek such help as part of an inclusive team.

I am sure that this will fit in well with our general themes of community cultural change and inter-generational initiatives, as well as the specifics of modern geriatric medicine.