The webinar recording is now available in the WHAHC Portal!
Join us as we continue the discussion sparked in our previous webinar “Nurses as the Main Workforce for Hospital at Home” and delve deeper into the vital role that allied health professionals have in Hospital at Home programs.
Speakers
Veronica Jones
RN, BSN, MBA-HC, Executive Director of Operations·Virtual Acute Care team at the St. Louis, Missouri-based Mercy System
Veronica serves as the Executive Director of Operations for a Virtual Acute Care team at the St. Louis, Missouri-based Mercy System. This unique team is a 24x7x365 provider-based, virtual acute care team that supports Mercy’s Primary Care Patients. The team is centered around a Board-Certified Emergency Medicine Physician, on-site with the team at all times, and includes Advance Practice Providers, Registered Nurses, and Patient Navigators. In just over 4 years the team had opportunity to serve over 750,000 Mercy-affiliated patients. The goal of the team is to increase access to care for Mercy’s Primary Care patient base. Veronica’s focus throughout her career at Mercy Virtual is to change healthcare in ways that improve patient access, outcomes, and satisfaction within a very complex healthcare system. Veronica earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing Degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia where she graduated Cum Laude and with General honors. Veronica then went on to receive her Master’s in Business Administration with a focus in Healthcare from Maryville University. Veronica currently lives in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri with her husband and 2 children where they enjoy camping, hunting, fishing, and being out of doors as much as possible.
Aimee Venner
Therapy Lead
I started with the GSTT @home service in 2018 as a Highly Specialist Occupational Therapist and progressed into the Therapy Lead post at the beginning of 2021. I am passionate about providing urgent home-based, patient-centred care that enables patients to remain in their own home for interventions that would otherwise require hospital admission. Having just celebrated 6 years in this amazing team is testament to this, and my drive for supporting the community urgent response vision into the future. In my personal and professional experience, avoiding unnecessary and multiple hospital admissions for elderly people is so important to their overall physical, mental and emotional, and social wellbeing. My career commenced with obtaining my Occupational Therapy degree in Australia in 2014. I have since practiced in various inpatient and community roles, with remote and vulnerable population groups in both the UK and Australia, inclusive of a vocational rehabilitation role within Western Australia’s gold mining industry. I am currently studying a Masters in Advanced Clinical Practice.
Meital Meltzer
BPT, Physiotherapist
I am alumna of Tel Aviv University with over 15 years of rehabilitation in adult population and student Guidance. In the last 8 years I have worked in Home Rehabilitation, 6 years in Sabar Home Hospital, the largest Home Hospital in Israel, treating over 1000 patients at any given point in their homes. In my professional capacity as manager of the physiotherapy discipline with responsibility of 200 team members I am responsible for the professional capacity, from the recruitment through the training and up to the quality assurance. I also lead the Rehab professional forum for standardization, guidelines and protocols, raising and promoting awareness in the home rehab hub.
Sophie McGlen
Pharmacist·Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, United Kingdom
Sophie is a pharmacist working in the Oxford hospital@home service for the past 5 years. She has led the development of the pharmacy service in Oxford, to be able to safely deliver an increasing number of medicines in the patients usual place of residence, to support the increasing acuity of patients treated. Sophie is also a trainee advanced clinical practitioner and is an early career researcher seeking to develop the evidence base for complex drug delivery in hospital@home.
Karen Titchener
Vice President of Hospital at Home Operations·Maribel Health
Karen Titchener has more than 20 years’ experience developing and implementing Hospital-at-Home (HaH) programs in both urban and rural settings for the UK’s NHS and five years’ experience creating and growing one of the nation’s first Oncology Specialty Care at Home programs for the University of Utah’s Huntsman Cancer Institute.
Currently, she is the Vice President of Hospital at Home Operations for Maribel Health, a General Catalyst-backed company created to make the home the center of the health system. Maribel was created to enable forward-thinking health systems to lead as care transitions to the home, leveraging a platform with dual capabilities for home-based care operations and associated software and technology.
Titchener is a widely recognized national and international expert on HaH program development, operations, growth, and optimization and has personally managed more than 15,000 HaH admissions. Her largest program operated in London with more than 85 staff and more than 3,000 annual patient admissions. Titchener’s oncology at-home program demonstrated reduced hospitalizations, lower length-of-stay, reduced ED utilization, and lower costs. In 2016, Titchener received the Winston Churchill Fellowship which enabled her to study the HaH programs in Australia and New Zealand. She has numerous peer-reviewed publications, including a recent publication in the Journal of Clinical Oncology demonstrating improved patient outcomes for Huntsman’s Oncology HaH program. She was a founding member of the UK Hospital at Home Society where she now serves as the secretary. Titchener routinely speaks nationally and internationally on all topics related to HaH and complex care in the home generally.