The Jewish Healthcare Foundation’s Patient Safety Fellowship will offer a unique curriculum this summer to explore the challenges and opportunities facing senior residential living and senior care. After the disruption of COVID-19, options for elders must embrace creative solutions that help older adults age well and safely in a range of settings. Fellows, working across disciplines, will explore existing and conceptual models for transforming our community and healthcare systems that maximize quality of life for elders and families.

Within teams, fellows will identify core elements to design a new model that enhances current systems to maximize safety and quality, and then they will pitch how the adoption and implementation of their model would address challenges of our current systems.

This Fellowship takes on a key challenge: the reality that professionals are not well prepared to deal with or talk about death, dying, and grieving families, especially during an era of COVID-19. The Fellowship allows participants to learn, confront, and discuss the legal, medical, social, cultural, familial, and spiritual aspects of death and dying within a multi-disciplinary group in a low-pressure environment. The sessions include opportunities to practice conversation skills, facilitated conversations, and virtual site visits.

The home for the 2019 Salk Health Activist Fellowship.

We are going to use this platform to be able to communicate effectively, collaborate, and build each other up for this fellowship. Activism starts here. Let us learn and use each other's strengths to the best of our ability. 

Together, we can change the world. 

Achieve the Triple Aim of healthcare quality improvement by providing patients with the information  on their care plans but encouraging them to ask “why?” In regards to physician orders. Additionally, encourage providers to be smarter with the care plans created for their patients by thinking more critically about what they are ordering.  

In an attempt to de-stigmatize drug use and promote access to care, an intiative to educate on the benefits of harm reduction methods, with an emphasis on access to syringe exchange programs, will be implemented. Using testimonials, infographics, and other promotional materials, myths and misconceptions of needle exchanges will be debunked. In addition, participants will be encourage to write their representatives to 1. decriminalize syringes, and 2. promote the legalization of needle exchanges statewide for Pennsylvania.

The aim of this project is to establish a maternal care collaborative similar to and modeled after the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative (CMQCC). This collaborative will differ in that it will be run for and by hospitals that primarily service neighborhoods with a large black population (there is evidence that points to the quality of care at hospitals where a disproportionate number of black women deliver as a contributing factor as to why black mothers are dying at a rate that is higher than white moms). 

Key elements of the collaborative:

- All hospitals in the collaborative will work to submit data to the MMRIA (Maternal Mortality Review Information Application) a free data system that allows users to develop quality improvement plans based on the reports generated by MMRIA (CMQCC has their maternal data center. This collaborative will utilize an existing free one to cut costs at least in the beginning). 

- Create and share development of evidence-based quality improvement toolkits that address the leading causes of preventable complications and deaths 

- Physician education: provide patient first continuing medical education for providers that address the common issues black women face in their pregnancies; physician and hospital administration education on new protocols for rare situations

- Use of predictive analytics to develop a risk score for pregnancy related complications and maternal mortality that will be available for all providers to see in the patient's EHR. (Major difference between this collaborative and CMQCC). 

- Development or outsourcing of a doula program similar to the use of case/disease managers for women who were identified as high risk through the risk score analysis mentioned above 

- Development and distribution of a patient satisfaction survey. Dedicated Committee to review all surveys and address issues 

Connect 4 Care calls on heathcare leaders to adopt one system-wide electronic health record (EHR) platform within thier healthcare system in order to alleviate burnout among healthcare professionals and improve patient outcomes.  

The home for the 2018 Salk Health Activist Fellowship.

We are going to use this platform to be able to communicate effectively, collaborate, and build each other up for this fellowship. Activism starts here. Let us learn and use each other's strengths to the best of our ability. 

Together, we can change the world. 

According to the Healthy People 2020 Midcourse Review (2016), only 21.3% of American adults meet the minimum physical activity (PA) guideline recommendations of 150 minutes of moderate intensity aerobic physical activity per week.  The vision of this action group is to become an advocate for prevention and wellness in health care.  This would involve a cultural shift from a reactive intervention based system to a proactive prevention based system.  This shift would prioritize maintaining an individual's independence and quality of life across the lifespan through minimizing sedentary activities and optimizing physical activity.  

Vitiligo (vit-ih-LIE-go) is a disease that causes the loss of skin color in blotches. The extent and rate of color loss from vitiligo is unpredictable. It can affect the skin on any part of your body. It may also affect hair and the inside of the mouth. The main reason and cause of vitiligo is the fact that the body itself decides to destroy its skin pigment. Without a doubt, this is an irregularity of the system. However, the main culprit for this setback is the immune system. Doctors currently can’t predict whether the Vitiligo on a person will spread, and  how fast. Currently, there is no known cure for Vitiligo, but treatment may be able to make skin tone appear more even. However, treatments can be time consuming and expensive, and often not covered by health insurance.  Because Vitiligo affects a person’s appearance, it is considered as a “cosmetic problem.” However, it is more than a “cosmetic problem.” It is a medical condition. People who have Vitiligo have a higher risk of getting some other medical conditions – such as hearing loss; painful sunburns; develop other autoimmune diseases; changes in vision/eye problems; anxiety and depression. Vitiligo is not contagious, and it is not life threatening. However, it is life-altering. Some people develop low self-esteem. They may no longer want to hang out with friends. They can develop serious depression. Most people have Vitiligo for life, so it’s important to develop coping strategies. Researchers have found that many people who have vitiligo often feel anxious and embarrassed around others. It’s easy to understand why. People often stare and make rude remarks. Some people are obviously frightened. Facing this day in and day out can take a toll on a person’s overall wellbeing. 

Vision: 

- Raise awareness about vitiligo and the dermatological and psychological impact the disease has on those affected by it.

- Partner with healthcare professionals, educational institutions and social workers and activists to work diligently toward securing grant funding and increase sponsors and donors.

- Encourage governmental agencies to make vitiligo research and advocacy efforts a high priority.

- Improve the care of patients with vitiligo by providing medical professionals with the best available information about vitiligo and its treatment.

- Improve teacher and staff training in schools so they are prepared to provide support to parents and students cope with this disease. 

The World Health Organization defines The Social Determinates of Health (SDH) as the circumstances in which people are born, grow up, live, work, and age, along with the systems put in place to deal with illness. These are in turn shaped by a wider set of forces that include the local environment, economics, education, social and community context, and access to healthcare.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we know that poverty limits access to healthy foods and safe neighborhoods and that more education is a predictor of better health. We also know that differences in health are striking in communities with poor SDOH such as unstable housing, low income, unsafe neighborhoods, or substandard education. By applying what we know about SDOH, we can not only improve individual and population health but also advance health equity.

Addressing these factors are vital to improve the overall health of the population. The SDH are ultimately influenced by the money, power, and resources at the local, state, and international level which has a large influence in health inequities.

Educating health professionals about the social determinants of health generates awareness among those professionals about the potential root causes of ill health and the importance of addressing them in and with communities, contributing to more effective strategies for improving health and health care for underserved individuals, communities, and populations.

There is only one problem that has affected every person who has ever lived on Earth, and it is the last one any of us ever face.

Americans have a unique problem with death: it's not simply that we don't know how to talk about it, it's that we largely refuse to talk about it at all or engage with the concepts and realities of our only truly unifying experience.  Healthcare providers feel they are failing if they even consider the topic of end of life conversations.  Popular culture debases our understanding of death by portraying it in every conceivable way other than the one in which we actually experience it. Only through preparation, understanding, and normalization can we improve end of life and the grieving and bereavement process of those we leave behind.

A popular modern author wrote: If you have ever lost a loved one, then you know exactly how it feels.  And if you have not, then you cannot possibly imagine it.

If loss is so universal, why do we not make it a priority to better prepare ourselves to face it?

That is the goal of this Action Group: to face the problem of illiteracy on the topics of death, grief, and bereavement with supportive materials that can be distributed or shared by anybody, in any forum, at any stage of life or in any setting of healthcare.

The vision of this group is to realize the implementation of medical marijuana as a viable therapeutic option. Although legislation has enacted its use in Pennsylvania for a select number of disease states, a number of barriers to implementation exist before comprehensive medical marijuana therapy can become a reality.

This action group hopes to learn from local leaders in medical marijuana policy reform, anticipate these barriers to impelementation, and combine resources to address the root causes that might affect the greatest downstream change. 

Last, this action group hopes to investigate research showing the influence of comprehensive marijuana policy on opioid abuse and overdose in pilot states across the country. Synthesis and analysis of this research may illuminate the role of medical marijuana as an alternative to opiate therapy in the management of long term pain. We hope to investigate this with both precision and urgency and present our findings to experts in pain management.

* To move from "diversity education" to inclusivity training.

* To empower entry-level clinicians in training, by giving them the tools they need to practice more inclusively across the lifespan of their careers: from classroom, to clinic, to educator.

* To empower educators to deliver high-quality inclusivity education and training, despite deficits in knowlede, background or self-efficacy.

We are going to use this platform to be able to communicate effectively, collaborate, and build each other up for this fellowship. Activism satrts here, let us learn and use each other's strengths to the best of our ability. 

We are here to help, and are open to any and all questions that you may possess. If we don't know the answer, we will do our best to find someone who does. Together, we can change the world. 

When patients are selecting a surgeon to perform a procedure it would be helpful for the patient to know the surgeon's personal history of complications when performing similar surgeries so that the patient could select the "best" surgeon.

Care coordination mistakes are costly... and not just in terms of financial expenses. Some of the most common care coordination mistakes are also major culprits for death and exacerbated patient health problems. U.S. News & World Reportindicates, “Medical errors are [the] third leading cause of death in the U.S. 10 percent of U.S. deaths are due to preventable medical mistakes" such as: Documentation errors  Communication Disconnects Lack of Coordination Neglecting Follow-ups Delays