OHCA The Oregon Caregiver Spring Summer 2021

www.ohca.com SPRING/SUMMER 2021 The Oregon Caregiver 31 EVENTS & EDUCATION UPDATE O HCA’s education and events calendar has undergone significant updates since March of 2020. Following the first instance of COVID-19 in Oregon, we made the difficult decision of canceling the 2020 Spring Expo and moved our remaining schedule of events to virtual offerings. Since we launched our first virtual class last spring, we’ve learned a lot and have improved along the way! I would like to thank our 2020 and 2021 education attendees for your patience, for sharing ideas and needs, and for joining us online for high quality educational content for over a year. I would also like to share a special thank you to our business partners who stuck with us during this challenging year, despite facing uncertainties and their own financial impacts due to the pandemic. We rely on event sponsorships from our business partners to be able to offer a wide variety of affordable educational classes and resources for provider members. Thank you for your support! As always, we encourage our provider members to turn to OHCA business partners first when looking for vendors and service providers. While we’ve successfully been able to offer our education virtually over the past year, we’ve heard over and over again from members that they are eagerly looking forward to opportunities to connect and learn in-person. (In fact, this was the number one comment on our Spring Expo evaluations.) Now that the federal Pharmacy Partner- ship for Long-Term Care Program has completed clinics in all Oregon long term care facilities and that vaccines are widely available to Oregonians across the state, we are hoping to offer select education classes in-person starting in late July. To prepare for this, we launched a member-wide survey in April and asked for feedback on safety precautions, concerns, and other considerations as we move to in-person offerings. We then used the responses and feedback from this survey to create our “Events Safety Protocols.” These protocols may be updated as conditions surrounding the pandemic change, and currently include the following key protocols: • Masks required during all in-person education events • Distanced seating arrangements • Reduced room capacities • Single-use food and dining options • Encouraging of handwashing and infection prevention best practices during events • Pre-event communications including screening requirements and sharing of our protocols • Touchless registration and check-in whenever possible Please reach out to me or anyone on the OHCA events team if you have any questions or concerns about these protocols and be sure to read them in full for details. In addition to working toward safely hosting select in-person events again, we are also looking at ways we can offer more virtual or hybrid educational opportunities in the future. Many members have reported that they like the option of virtual events some of the time due to time constraints and ease of access. In response to this, you’ll see many more virtual and hybrid offerings available from us going forward than we typically held pre-COVID. Lastly, we’re planning to take the best of what we learned over the past year and apply that to future offerings. For example, our digital events materials pages have been widely used and referenced by event attendees, so we’ll be keeping those for the long term. In addition, offering event materials digitally when possible and appropriate is a great way for us to cut down on printing and paper waste. Please reach out to myself, Melodie King, our director of education and events, or anyone else on the OHCA team if you have any questions about upcoming events, requests for specific content or topics, or have questions about our safety protocols and plans. Rosie Ward is the Senior Vice President of Strategy at OHCA. OHCA 2021 Events and Education Update By Rosie Ward, Oregon Health Care Association While we’ve been successfully able to offer our education virtually over the past year, we’ve heard over and over again from members that they are eagerly looking forward to opportunities to connect and learn in-person.