The Guide | My Experience | The Action Plan
Here is the action plan which is designed in response to the Ministry of Health requirement for resident and family councils to ensure the quality of life of patients. For the Action Plan I make the following assumptions:
- that you have read the outline description of the guide that I have provided so that we are talking about the same thing and not at cross purposes.
- Parkinson’s is the fastest growing neurodegenerative disease at the moment. While we have only two residents at the moment we have to come up with a solution that would work for potentially more people with Parkinson’s and who typically would not speak English well
- every complex disease that the LTC needs to implement would need to have a staff member assigned as the local champion of the standard of care. The local champion will work together with the disease standard champion who knows both the disease and the standard. This would typically be someone from the professional society involved in the disease, a standards committee from a university. In the case of Parkinson’s I would be happy to be the disease standard champion, if management approves of my involvement.
- A team or workgroup must be established to look at what already meets the requirements and what else needs to be done to meet the requirements of the Act. For the evc guide it is fairly easy:
- The normal procedures will be followed ito personal care, nursing and diet.
- Parkinson’s has unique requirements for determining the medication regimen and we need to ensure that it is clearly defined so that it is uncomplicated and stress-free for the resident, who we need to assume has no knowledge of the pharmacology of the medications that may be needed. Depending on the outcome of this meeting, the personal doctor together with resident and/of family member may find the New Parkinsons Disease Treatment Book useful.
- We need to figure out the way of keeping and maintaining the records (forms the medical records person may want to have a say here)
- we need to establish formally how to provide access to the team of medical experts in Parkinson’s. It may be that we provide contact information of the person who will act as the personal doctor as described in the guide, or an online website request form describing the symptom requiring attention. Normally, the local champion would be a nurse and she would intitiate the request and the personal doctor would vet the request as he/she sees fit
- For each resident added to LTC, we need to go through the four living well chapters of the guide with the resident in order to understand the resident’s particular interests and cultural specific requirements and determine what we can provide the resident from our standard activities, or if we reasonably offer something new, or the resident or a family member may be able to provide something. The Activities manager would want to get involved.
- exercise specific to Parkinson’s is an important part of the of the evc guide and we need to see to what extent that can be provided (the physiotherapist needs to be brought it).
- The normal procedures will be followed ito personal care, nursing and diet.