Dear Fellows,
Greeting to all current and incoming fellows. I am looking forward to a rewarding year serving as the Fellows-In-Training section chair. As trainees in geriatrics medicine, we focus on helping older adults live functional, high quality lives. Because of exercise's proven benefits in preventing functional decline, recommending increased physical activity is one of the most important interventions we as geriatricians can make. An important component of giving an effective recommendation is personal role modeling. However, at my fellowship program we have frequently found it difficult to achieve the Surgeon General's guidelines for physical activity of 30 minutes or more of moderate-intensity physical activity on all or most days of the week.
In order to address this, we have started a voluntary incentive program that we affectionately named the "Star Solution." We created a poster on which we put gold stars representing physical activity achievements: one star equals 150 minutes of aerobic activity per week or two resistance training session per week, with extra stars for more activity. Each fellow invests one dollar a week and if she/he gets two stars per week the dollar is returned. Any dollars not earned back go to the fellows' end-of-the-year party fund. We are now one month into our program and most of the fellows have increased their level of physical activity and maintain that level more consistently than before.
Our "Star Solution" is just one fun way to help inspire positive lifestyle changes in ourselves so that we can be successful role models for our patients. I hope that we will be able to exchange other inspirational ideas for motivating physician self-care at the upcoming American Geriatric Society meeting.
Dallas Nelson, MD
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