The Grace Ballas Geriatrics Department
The Department is charged with rehabilitatingelderly patients following acute events that disrupt their functionality and capacity of serving themselves. The rehabilitation process aims to restore the patient's functioning in their natural habitat as much as possible.
Amongst the type of patients who benefit from Department services are patients who had suffered a stroke or a fracture - in particular, hip fractures, and patients who had undergone hip or knee joint replacement, and patients suffering from exhaustion due to disease, severe infections or past operations.
Patients are transferred from every other hospital department, from other hospitals and from the community (following approval by the insuring sick fund). The Department's staff is composed of doctors specializing in internal and geriatric medicine, nurses with academic and clinical experience with treating complex patients in general, and elderly patients in particular. The department also includes a physiotherapy team, an occupational therapy team, and a speech therapist who maintains rich and diverse experience with treating elderly populations - as well as a nutritionist, social worker and trained, experienced attendants to the elderly.
The Rehabilitative Department consists of 18 hospital beds, and there exist plans for its future extension.
Admission Process
The patient will arrive at the department and undergo a structured admission process administrated by all relevant care providers. This process will include a basic, medical and nursing functional assessment, as well as an assessment of the patient's personal and familial resources.
There exists an emphasis on holistic treatment, as opposed to a particular rehabilitative treatment of a specific problem. In addition to the diagnosis performed, the team provides a multidisciplinary overview for the purpose of balancing all of the patient's conditions and medications, while taking into account personality, family and environmental factors, in an attempt to attain a more effective rehabilitation, with the purpose of achieving the best quality of life possible. The Unit perseveres in maintaining continuous contact with family members and members of the community.
The Department leads an open door policy. Every patient and their family members can obtain information from the Department's Director, doctors and multi-disciplinary rehabilitation team.
Consulting Geriatric Clinic
The Department maintains a weekly geriatric clinic to which patients who had undergone rehabilitation in the department are referred, as well as elderly residents of the region, who are referred by their family doctor to geriatric consultation pertaining to such diverse topics as: functional deterioration, memory impairment, administration of multiple medications, mood changes, loss of sphincter control, falling, and more. The clinic's team maintains close relations with treatment teams and nursing institutions available in the community.
Cognitive Diagnosis Clinic
The Department operates a unique clinic which focuses on the overview and treatment of memory impairment in the elderly population. The clinic's team is composed of a geriatric specialist, an occupational therapist with extensive clinical experience with memory impairment in the elderly, and a social worker.
Clinic visitation includes the gathering of previous medical-social information provided by caregivers in the community, the patient and their family. At a later stage, diagnoses are conducted for the purpose of ascertaining the reasons for the memory impairment, and these include neurological tests, neuropsychological examinations, blood tests and simulations.
At the end of the overview process, a detailed summary is relayed to the patient and to their personal physician, which contains a overview of all findings. Accordingly, the patient receives a diverse set of treatment recommendations, and is later invited to conduct a re-inspection for the purpose of assessing the efficacy of the treatment provided. The clinic maintains close contact with family doctors, geriatric physicians and communal services for the elderly.
Geriatric Consultation Service
Departmental doctors provide consultation to all hospitalization wards in the hospital treating elderly patients, and, among other things, endeavor to facilitate the treatment of hospitalized elderly patients, assist in appointing guardians and facilitate early discharge. This includes maintaining relations with community services. In addition, patients are recommended for and referred to protracted hospitalization in the Geriatric Rehabilitation Departments, Nursing Departments, complex Nursing Departments and the Domestic Hospitalization System operated by the various funds.
Teaching
The Department acts as a teaching center for nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy and social work students. During their stay in the department, students are exposed to a wide variety of patients with common geriatric conditions. In addition, the Department provides instruction sessions for domestic caregivers.
Moreover, the Department is an accredited academic unit for geriatric medicine specialization, in collaboration with the Acute Geriatric Department in Ziv Medical Center in Safed and, with the opening of the Safed School of Medicine, the Department shall provide a leading teaching
resource in all matters pertaining to treating the elderly.
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