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ne of my favorite aspects of my job is the opportunity to attend several long-term care conferences throughout the year. The rows and rows of booths in the exhibit halls, boasting all the latest extended care products and technology, never cease to amaze me, and sitting in on a presentation from a long-term care thought leader is a terrific learning experience. I always come back from the conferences with a better feel for what’s new in the industry and a few exciting ideas about how to bring the latest information to the pages of ECPN.
       Another nice thing about the conferences is that at any moment you can meet someone of great future value to your mission. That is obviously true for the companies that might land a big sale at the show, but it applies to me as well. One example of that was meeting Dr. Guy Fragala, PhD, PE, CSP, at the American Health Care Association (AHCA) conference in Las Vegas, Nev, in October. There I learned of Dr. Fragala’s recent work on safe patient-handling practices, particularly the “Creating a Safer Environment” (CASE) program. His vision for the program is, at first, to provide healthcare organizations with a simple and easily implemented approach to safer resident lifting. Shortly after we met, Dr. Fragala graciously accepted our invitation to contribute a series of articles to introduce the CASE program to ECPN readers, the first of which, “Improving Facility Staff’s Resident-Handling Practices,” appears in this issue.
       Perhaps the best part of the conferences, however, is the chance to meet and discuss ECPN with you, the readers. Your opinions carry a lot of weight with us as we continue our mission of making the journal as useful and informative as possible. The request for more articles geared to the Director of Nursing led to our recurring “Director’s Chair” column, and we have fulfilled readers’ requests for a series of informative articles on the impact of Medicare Part D on their facilities and/or disciplines (the next of which, focusing on assisted living, will appear in our March issue). It is also helpful to gauge the reactions of people who stop by our booth and flip through a copy of ECPN for the first time.
       In closing, I hope to meet many of you at the spring and summer long-term care conferences—please don’t hesitate to come to the ECPN booth and let us know what you think about the journal. But for those of you who won’t be attending them, I welcome your feedback on the journal, whether it is a quick e-mail or a “letter to the editor” for publication. As always, thank you for reading.