PALTmed Choosing Wisely Guide: Twenty Things Prescribers and Patients Should Question in Post-Acute and Long-Term Care
In the evolving landscape of post-acute and long-term care (PALTC), clinicians face daily decisions about diagnostics, treatments, and interventions for the residents under their care.
The recently updated “PALTmed Choosing Wisely Guide: Twenty Things Prescribers and Patients Should Question in Post-Acute and Long-Term Care”, published by PALTmed (previously known as AMDA), offers a concise, evidence-based framework to help clinicians and interdisciplinary teams anchor resident interventions to what really matters – their goals, function, comfort, and meaningful outcomes.
It covers a range of diagnostics and treatments commonly seen in our care setting – encouraging best practices such as:
Stopping sliding scale insulin
Avoiding over-use of urinalyses
The guide is tailored specifically for the PALTC environment to serve as a tool to facilitate interdisciplinary conversations. Medical providers, nursing, therapy, administrative, and quality teams can all use it as a touchpoint for reviewing practice patterns.
The following are examples of how this tool can be implemented in your facility or organization to support clinical practice:
Quality improvement initiatives
Education resource for families and staff
Support advance care planning and goals of care discussions
Establish clinical protocols and pathways
We encourage you to share this information with your IDT members, establish next steps for use, and consider the following recommendations:
Select one to two statements that are most relevant to your facility (e.g., catheter use, sedative/hypnotics) and discuss in your next IDT or QAPI meeting.
After implementation of a chosen practice change, select one metric to evaluate over the next quarter and reassess.
Resources:
