With warmer days of spring around the corner, now is the perfect time to hunker down and get your professional affairs in order. I have a solution that involves no paperwork or heavy lifting.

Sometimes long-term care nurses feel like step-sisters to their acute-care counterparts. Face it: Hospital nurses usually get the glory.

It was both flattering and intimidating. At the LeadingAge convention, someone asked me to state my hopes for the future of long-term care. What a thrill to be asked, but with all the possibilities, where should one start?

Hopefully a certain bound-to-be viral video has already gotten to you. If not, you can thank me later.

So this is what it comes to when No. 1 attempts to buy No. 2. This could be some lively theater by the time the final curtain drops.

If you thought the politicians' recent stomach-turning brinksmanship over the national debt ceiling wasn't fun — and who did? — you have no reason to look forward to the end of November and December.

"Eye-opening" is the only way to describe results of a new study by Brown University researchers into eldercare usage patterns. In brief, they found that minority residents have been entering nursing homes at a higher rate than in previous decades.

The Hebrew Rehabilitation Center in Boston ought to be getting a lot more attention from the profession. The center has successfully implemented a program that reduces rehospitalization rates.

I haven't heard them pronounced this way yet, but long-term care providers might want to consider it when it comes to ACOs. Instead of spelling it out, as in A-C-O, say it phonetically, as in "Ache-O."

News that nursing home ratings would be frozen on the federal website for consumer research for six months drew a lot of interest from providers when regulators' plans were announced this spring. And it should have.