Vision Statement: Our patients deserve the best continuity of care possible. With that said, our nurses should effectively communicate patient information with our physicians in order to ensure the best treatment for acute condition changes in order to prevent hospital readmissions.

This presentation explains the role of skilled nursing facilities in the reduction of hospital readmissions.

"In attempts to reduce nosocomial infections, the focus of PPE is shifted to include patient protection.

This innovation project will help lead the healthcare organization to better health deliver and better service because it will prevent transmission of nosocomial infections between patients via hospital staff. Patients with HAI’s tend to have a longer duration hospital stay as well as more costs. Likewise, current healthcare reform restricts reimbursements for treatments associated with nosocomial infections. By minimizing these costly infections, the healthcare organization will be able to realize a greater profit."

The escalation of the opioid epidemic in the United States has sparked sweeping legislation meant to regulate physicians' opioid prescribing practices. The demands of such policies force physicians to initiate discussions that could jeopardize the collaborative doctor- patient relationships necessary for curbing inappropriate opioid prescriptions. Drawing on sociopragmatics, this discourse analysis study of primary care interactions examines the face- saving linguistic features employed by physicians in negotiating the line between policy demands and maintaining collaborative relationships. The findings reveal several face-saving acts‚"pseudo requests, downtowners, broadening, redirection, tag questions, impersonalization, listing, and (negative) imagery‚"used by physicians when enacting the three most prominent policies: (1) monitoring opioid use, (2) prescribing anti-overdose medication, and (3) transitioning patients from opioids to alternative treatment. Informed by Goffman's concept of "face-work," this study provides evidence of the communicative burden placed on physicians implementing disagreeable opioid policies, as well as opening up discussions on how policymakers and medical institutions can support physicians in implementing opioid policies. Keywords: opioids, face-work, face threats, medical discourse, doctor-patient interaction, discourse analysis, sociopragmatics

In recent years, the opioid crisis in the United States has sparked significant discussion on doctor- patient interactions concerning chronic pain treatments, but little to no attention has been given to investigating the vocal aspects of patient talk. This exploratory sociolinguistic study intends to fill this knowledge gap by employing prosodic discourse analysis to examine context-specific linguistic features used by the interlocutors of two distinct medical interactions. We found that patients employed both low pitch and creak as linguistic resources when describing chronic pain, narrating symptoms, and requesting opioids. The situational use of both features informs us about the linguistic ways in which patients frame fraught issues like chronic pain in light of the current opioid crisis. This study expands the breadth of phonetic analysis within the domain of discourse analysis, serving to illuminate discussions surrounding the illocutionary role of the lower vocal tract in expressing emotions.

The present study uses corpus-assisted discourse analysis to examine the role of modality in policy verb phrases, using California opioid policies as a case study. By tracking the behavior of permissive and restrictive modals across time, this study highlights two potential discourse functions of modals in policy drafting: (i) to reflect the gravity of the issues on the ground, and (ii) to express permission and restriction by highlighting and deemphasizing a policy's suggestive intent, respectively. This study shows that the increased use of restrictive modality has significant positive correlations with California's worsening opioid crisis and its rising fatalities. A closer examination of state policy amendments reveals that altering policy modals has the potential to either broaden or limit the terms of existing policies. Informed by Van Dijk's “context models,” this study provides a cogent applied corpus linguistics framework for analyzing policy text and offers both political and linguistic perspectives into our understanding of modals and how communities address epidemics, respectively.