APTA's Education Leadership Institute (ELI) Fellowship, a shared collaborative with the Academic Council, Education Section, Physical Therapist Assistant Educators Special Interest Group, and APTA, now is accepting applications for 2013 with a submission deadline of January 4, 2013. This yearlong invitational blended learning (online and onsite components) fellowship program includes mentorship and is designed to provide emerging and novice (0-7 years) physical therapist and physical therapist assistant education program directors with leadership skills to facilitate change, think strategically, and engage in public discourse to advance the physical therapy profession. Successful graduates from this program are recognized as Fellows of the Education Leadership Institute. To learn more about the ELI Fellowship, click here. To access the application, click here.

Hospitals of all types can engage in a systematic approach to better identify and prevent medical errors and adverse events that occur commonly among patients with limited English proficiency (LEP). Research available from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality makes these 5 key recommendations to improve detection of medical errors across diverse LEP populations and prevent high-risk scenarios from becoming safety events:

• Foster a supportive culture for safety of diverse patient populations.
• Adapt current systems to better identify medical errors among patients with LEP.
• Improve reporting of medical errors for patients with LEP.
• Routinely monitor patient safety for patients with LEP.
• Address root causes to prevent medical errors among patients with LEP.

For hospitals with resource or other limitations that preclude a full rollout of these strategies at once, the authors suggest beginning incrementally by choosing any strategies that can be readily implemented and, at a minimum, focus on addressing the root causes that lead to high-risk scenarios for medical errors among patients with LEP. 

A case study, Bringing It to Life, highlights a breakdown in communication involving hospital staff and a 45-year-old Spanish-speaking man with type 2 diabetes who goes to the emergency department accompanied by his wife.  

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) is hosting a video contest for health care providers to showcase their innovative, patient-centered approaches that improve the way care teams communicate with their patients, especially when a patient is transitioning from the hospital to home care. If you've pioneered a collaborative way to improve patients' care and their health outcomes, read the judging criteria and submission guidelines and submit your video by November 17.

Winners will receive special recognition from RWJF, a professionally produced video segment on their innovation, and the opportunity to discuss their methods with patients and health care providers in local and national media.

Aquatic workouts may trump land-based exercise for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), says an article by Reuters Health based on a study published in European Respiratory Journal.

For their investigation, Australian researchers randomly assigned 53 participants to workouts in a hydrotherapy pool, gym-based training, or standard medical care without exercise. The exercise programs include 3 weekly 1-hour sessions over 2 months. Forty-five patients completed the study.

Whether they worked out on land or in water, patients were able walk faster after the training than when they just got usual care. But patients who exercised in the pool reported less fatigue and developed more physical endurance than those who trained in the gym.

On the endurance shuttle walk test, patients who'd exercised in water outpaced the gym trainers by 228 meters (748 feet).

"Participants in the water-based exercise training group reported an improvement in many functional aspects of their daily life such as improved stamina and ability to complete tasks such as walking long distances when shopping," said lead author Renae McNamara, PT.

There had been some concerns that people with COPD might not tolerate the pressure from the water on the chest. The researchers saw no drop-outs due to worsening COPD in patients training in the pool, although they did see some in the gym group. The authors reported that most of the participants in the study did not have severe disease, says Reuters.