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Description
of Geriatrics Training Grants Announced June 16, 2006 Brown University, Providence, RI – $2,000,000 Brown University will plan, design, implement and evaluate an integrated, competency-based geriatrics curriculum for all of its 344 medical students across all four years of their training. The curriculum redesign will include new geriatric content in the first two student years, new geriatric patients and content on geriatric diseases and conditions in all but the pediatric clerkship, the development of a geriatrics virtual curriculum as a complement to the basic science curriculum, and a four-year cross-disciplinary area of emphasis in aging. This project will also enrich 150 internal medicine and 48 emergency medicine residents with geriatrics content. For example, new geriatric teaching cases for students and residents in emergency medicine will use the department’s simulation center. Faculty development for basic sciences senior faculty members and geriatrics faculty will ensure that those who teach geriatric content to students will experience a series of educational retreats using the teaching of geriatrics content as the vehicle for general educational skills development.
Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL – $1,999,310 In recognition that the state of Florida has the highest percentage of older adults of any state, Florida State University College of Medicine was created by legislative act in June 2000 with a mandate to provide a special emphasis on preparing students to care for elderly patients, underserved minorities and rural populations. It will focus its program on teaching in two key behavioral areas: geriatric-care principles such as communication skills, functional assessment and therapeutic review, and geriatric-syndrome management for syndromes such as delirium, falls and polypharmacy. Students will receive a four-year longitudinal curriculum in geriatrics incorporating these principles. They will also participate in a senior mentor program and have the option to participate in a geriatrics interest group. A newly geriatricized family medicine residency will include a system-wide delirium prevention program, among other things. Faculty responsible for teaching medical students and all of the teaching hospital’s hospitalists – physicians who work only in hospitals – will be trained in geriatrics in order to better teach geriatric content. Contact: Lisa J. Granville, MD Professor and Associate Chair Department of Geriatrics Florida State University College of Medicine 1115 West Call Street, Suite 3140 Tallahassee, FL 32306-4300
(850) 645-1513 Harvard University, Boston, MA – $2,000,000 The Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School will expand and improve the geriatrics education of their students, residents in general surgery, emergency medicine and internal medicine, and practicing physicians. The Advancement of Geriatrics Education (AGE) Project will employ high-fidelity medical simulators to incorporate geriatrics cases into required courses, and add geriatric content to core first- and second-year student courses. Third-year students will encounter new geriatrics experiences in a year-long course that includes weekly conferences, medical simulation cases and interactive, web-based cases. AGE will employ a train-the-trainer approach to enable academic hospitalists and key faculty in the internal medicine, emergency medicine and surgery departments to enhance residency training in geriatrics. The electronic health record at BIDMC will be enhanced with education tools and prompts to teach residents “on the job.” Interactive web-based teaching modules will be created for the education of physicians around the world via the Harvard CME Online web platform. All products will be evaluated and disseminated to other Harvard-affiliated teaching hospitals and beyond.
Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, Lubbock, TX – $ 1,999,947
Texas Tech has a multi-campus medical school
that serves diverse and rural communities. Students complete two years
of medical education in Lubbock, then select campuses in Lubbock,
Amarillo or El Paso for third- and fourth-year training. Texas Tech
plans a five-part program. First, it will implement a required
Geriatrics Track in it’s four-year undergraduate curriculum to teach the
knowledge, skills and attitudes required to care for senior citizens.
Second, it will offer a series of optional programs such as student
groups, lunchtime roundtables, a geriatrics mentor program and summer
research programs, to stimulate medical student interest in geriatrics.
Third, it will create an integrated geriatrics track for primary care
residents in internal medicine and family medicine and residents in
neuropsychiatry. The track will feature, among other things,
twice-monthly geriatric podcasts for residents and practicing
physicians. Fourth, the project will offer geriatric training to
medical and surgical specialty residents, fellows and faculty, beginning
with the departments of surgery and orthopedics. Finally it will
establish a Geriatrics Faculty Development Program to provide new
formats for faculty and practicing physicians to improve their practice
and teaching of geriatrics. Contact: Lynn S. Bickley, MD Associate Dean for Curriculum Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center School of Medicine 3601 4th Street STOP 8326 Lubbock, TX 79430-8326
(806) 743-5666 University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ – $1,975,236
Arizona is the second-fastest-growing state,
with growth among older age groups and older ethnic minorities
especially pronounced. The University of Arizona will develop the
Arizona Reynolds Program of Applied Geriatrics, a competency-based
teaching program that emphasizes the practical application of geriatric
knowledge to provide safe and quality care for frail elders. It will
integrate required and optional geriatrics into four years of the new
medical school curriculum in Tucson and the new Phoenix Campus. The
faculty development program will prompt many non-geriatricians,
including faculty from selected subspecialties and surgery and related
specialties, to integrate geriatrics into their specialty training. The
Reynolds Scholars in Aging (RSIA) will serve as change agents and
mentors for peers, junior faculty, residents, and medical students, and
will develop and implement physician-directed quality improvement
projects. Residents in internal and family medicine, emergency medicine,
and numerous subspecialty and surgery and related specialties, as well
as chief residents, will learn geriatrics through case-based teaching
sessions, self-directed learning, morning report, seminars, web-based
modules, and through participation in the RSIA quality improvement
projects. Physicians in the Indian Health Service, the Veterans
Administration hospitals, and in the community will benefit from
site-specific, self-directed learning that integrates geriatrics into
their practices. Contact: Mindy J. Fain, MD Section Head and Program Director, Geriatrics Department of Medicine University of Arizona College of Medicine Arizona Center on Aging 1807 East Elm Street Tucson, AZ 85719
(520) 626-5812 University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA – $2,000,000 The University of California, San Francisco is a leader in the rapidly growing hospitalist movement, whereby physicians work solely in the hospital, making them the most frequent and influential teachers of medical students and residents in inpatient settings. It will focus on two geriatric issues related to hospitalists: transitions of care, and care of hospitalized elders. Two geriatrician hospitalists will be recruited to run an Acute Care of the Elderly (ACE) unit and provide teaching and faculty development. In addition, hospitalists will be selected as Reynolds Hospitalist Scholars to learn geriatrics, improve teaching techniques, and develop geriatrics curriculum. And the program will offer a 40-hour train-the–trainers experience for all interested hospitalists at any of the UCSF-affiliated teaching hospitals. Thus within UCSF’s two themes, every medical student will: experience a transitional care experience and accompanying curriculum; participate in, receive feedback on and be tested on a geriatrics case experience; and have a mentored home visit. Residents in internal medicine, ophthalmology, orthopedic surgery, anesthesiology, emergency medicine and family medicine will also learn from new and expanded geriatrics curricula.
University of Kansas, Kansas City, KS – $2,000,000 To address a dearth of practicing geriatricians in the state of Kansas, the University of Kansas will strengthen geriatrics in all of its training programs for physicians. It will annually provide comprehensive training in geriatrics to 700 undergraduate medical students, more than 223 medical residents, and 4 faculty to optimize the quality of health care for vulnerable older adults. All of its educational activities will be guided by the principle of providing the trainee with an appropriate, broad-based foundation for managing the health care needs of older adult patients, with and without complex chronic illness, across the continuum of care. It will integrate quality indicators from the Assessing Care of Vulnerable Elders (ACOVE) project, and basic geriatric medicine content in the areas of improving functional independence, avoiding medical errors, appropriate pharmacy use, understanding system efficiencies, and transitions of care into all of its educational materials and methods. The project will employ innovative technology including CD-ROMs, computerized patient simulations and web-based training modules.
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT – $2,000,000 The University of Utah has recently reconfigured and expanded its Center on Aging. The university now plans an educational program that will impact geriatrics training for all students in its School of Medicine, primary care internal medicine and family medicine residents and faculty, and primary care physicians across the state of Utah and the surrounding region along two specific themes. First, the team of a medical student or resident and a non-geriatrician (hospitalist, general internal medicine, or family medicine) preceptor will function as the target of educational programs. Faculty development for these preceptors is an important component as is required geriatrics content for medical students that will be integrated into all four years of the curriculum and tracked using an individualized portfolio system. Second, geriatrics education will be delivered to practicing physicians in the context of developing a quality improvement program for their practices. More than 100 primary care providers from across the state from University of Utah-affiliated Community Clinics, VA-affiliated Community Based Outpatient Clinics, and the Intermountain Healthcare group will receive this educational program focused on incorporating principles of geriatric assessment into primary care practice.
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN – $1,999,844 Vanderbilt University’s Informatics Center leads the nation in adapting informatics (the sciences concerned with gathering, manipulating, storing, retrieving and classifying recorded information) to improve medical systems. Thus its Vanderbilt-Reynolds Geriatrics Education Center (VR-GEC) will build upon Vanderbilt’s many successful informatics efforts, including electronic capture and concept-based indexing of all medical school curricular content, effective delivery of educational decision support at the point of care through both electronic medical record and computerized physician order-entry systems. These systems will provide a platform to deliver and reinforce geriatrics content that will strengthen geriatrics training of virtually 100 percent of trainees and faculty, providing ongoing education during potentially every geriatric patient encounter. Using these systems, the VR-GEC will integrate geriatrics into all four years of the medical school curriculum, allowing it to identify individual students’ exposure to geriatrics and geriatrics knowledge gaps to permit timely supplemental instruction. It will also enhance medical and surgical residency training programs in geriatrics with specialty-appropriate training, and create a Geriatrics and Gerontology Advisory Service to develop content and continuing medical education programs in geriatrics “best practices” for more than 1,000 faculty and affiliated community physicians.
Yeshiva University, Bronx, NY – $1,997,826 Located in the Bronx, New York, Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University is set in a poor and medically underserved community. Its main teaching hospital, Montefiore Medical Center, provides care for 1.5 million people and is home to one of the largest residency programs in the United States. It will create a GeriEd Program will emphasize the complex medical and neuropsychiatric geriatric syndromes of dementia, falls and delirium as a paradigm for geriatric medicine. The goals of the program are to develop expertise managing geriatric conditions, understand interactions between aging and disease, recognize the effects of aging and other conditions on physical and mental function, identify medication issues, coordinate care, preserve independence and assist families with decision-making. It will target 157 practicing physicians, 257 residents, and 750 medical students annually, relying on training strategies that include the use of quality-improvement methods, local expertise, “geriatrics champions” who will serve as recourses, one-on-one teaching, conferences and web-based training.
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