Physical therapists are likely to find themselves responding to patient questions about how the Affordable Care Act will affect their health care. Are you prepared to help point them to the answers they need?

Despite the government shutdown that began October 1, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) remains unaffected. But as the ACA continues to rollout major features—most recently, the marketplace system—the public remains largely uninformed.

A September 28 tracking poll from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that as late as last month, 51% of all Americans felt that they lacked adequate information on the ACA. Most feel that current news coverage on health reform focuses more on political wrangling than on providing information, and more often than not, respondents stated that they don't know where to turn for accurate, unbiased information on the changes.

Many public uncertainties remain, according to the poll. These include worries about cost (19%), confusion about where to find an easy-to-understand, unbiased summary of the ACA (18%), a need to know how the ACA will make things better (7%%), impacts on specific groups (6%), personal/family impacts (5%), questions about insurance marketplace plans (5%), and questions about the impact on currently-held insurance (4%).

You may not need to know all the answers to these questions, but helping a patient find resources is important. The federal government has published a series of fact sheets on the ACA, and on October 1 the Kaiser Foundation released a series of consumer resources that aim to answer the most common questions.

Of course, physical therapists have plenty of questions about how ACA will affect their work. Answers can be found in APTA's "10 Things You Need to Know on October 1" guide on the Expansion of Coverage webpage.

Healthy People 2020 places a renewed emphasis on identifying, measuring, tracking, and reducing health disparities through a “social determinants of health” approach and its new Social Determinants of Health topic area and objectives. Join other health care professionals on Wednesday, April 24, 1:00 pm-2:30 pm, ET, for a webinar that will explore conditions in the social, physical, and economic environment in which people live and their related health outcomes. Presentations will include examples of communities that are addressing the social determinants of health to reduce health disparities. Register today.

This webinar will feature representatives from the Department of Health and Human Services, The Pew Charitable Trusts, Health Resources and Services Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Healthy People 2020 will hold a webinar on Thursday, March 21, noon ET, highlighting the success of 1 community-wide partnership in reducing childhood obesity through community outreach, advocacy, education, policy development, and environmental change. US Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Health, Howard Koh, MD, MPH, will lead the 45-minute webinar, which will include a roundtable discussion on the impact of this critical leading health indicator topic.

Register here for this event.

APTA has added a new resource to its Balance and Falls webpage to help physical therapists reduce falls that occur during a patient's hospital stay. "Preventing Falls in Hospitals: A Toolkit for Improving Quality of Care" addresses hospital readiness, program management, fall prevention practices, implementation, measurement, and sustainability. Developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the toolkit is designed for multiple uses. The core document is an implementation guide organized under 6 major questions intended to be used primarily by the implementation team charged with leading the effort to put the new prevention strategies into practice. The full guide also includes links to tools and resources found in the Tools and Resources section of the toolkit, on the Web, or in the literature. The tools and resources are designed to be used by different audiences and for different purposes, as indicated in the guide.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's (RWJF) "promising practices" library includes interventions and how-to guides for improving care and addressing major issues in health care quality and equality. Topics include reducing readmissions, improving patient satisfaction and engagement, enhancing patient safety, managing emergency department crowding, and reducing disparities.

The US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recently released its updated 2012 Guide to Clinical Preventive Services—an authoritative source that can help primary care clinicians and patients decide together what preventive services are right for a patient's needs. This edition of the guide includes the USPSTF’s evidence-based recommendations on clinical preventive services from 2002 through March 2012, topics in development, and at-a-glance clinical summary tables.

Go to USPSTF's A-Z Topic Guide to access recommendation statements on interventions to prevent low back pain, falls in older adults, and osteoporosis. USPSTF also makes recommendations on screening for and management of obesity in adults and children.

The 2012 guide can be found on the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's website.

A new infographic roadmap from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) illustrates a 6-step framework that integrates reducing disparities into all health care quality improvement efforts. The framework is designed to be flexible: organizations can get on the road where appropriate. Its goal is to support a thoughtful and comprehensive approach to achieving equity, even though the causes of disparities may vary across regions or patient populations.

The roadmap draws upon lessons learned from RWJF's Finding Answers' 33 grantee projects and 11 systematic reviews of the disparities-reduction literature.

Use this updated interactive map from The Commonwealth Fund to review the status of state action on state health insurance exchanges and view key aspects of existing exchanges, state legislation, and executive orders. Details include information on exchanges' governance, board membership

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) new STEADI Tool Kit gives health care providers information and tools to assess and address their older patients' falls risk.

The STEADI (Stopping Elderly Accidents, Deaths and Injuries) Tool Kit is based on a simple algorithm adapted from the American and British Geriatric Societies' Clinical Practice Guideline. It includes basic information about falls, case studies, conversation starters, and standardized gait and balance assessment tests (with instructional videos). In addition, there are educational handouts about falls prevention specifically designed for patients and their friends and family.

APTA members who are experts in falls prevention assisted CDC with the development of the toolkit, specifically with the evidence based community falls prevention programs. Additionally, APTA staff appear in several videos on tests that were recorded at APTA.

A link to the toolkit also is available on APTA's Balance and Falls webpage under "Related Resources."

November's Visualizing Health Policy, JAMA's monthly infographic series created by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), takes a look at Medicare: who is covered by the program; what proportion of Medicare beneficiaries use at least 1 medical service in a year; how health care spending per person is growing more slowly for Medicare than for private insurance; and how rising health care costs and a growing population pose fiscal challenges to keeping Medicare solvent in the years ahead.

Archived infographics are available on KFF's website.