Member News
July 20th, 2010
Taking Charge of Your Health: A Guide to Getting the Best Health Care as You Age, was written by AGS members John Burton, MD, director of the Johns Hopkins Geriatric Education Center, professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and a professor in the Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, and William Hall, MD, director of the Center for Healthy Aging at Highland Hospital in Rochester, NY and the Paul Fine Professor of Medicine at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. The book, published in June by Johns Hopkins University Press, is a comprehensive guide to help older adults navigate the health care system.
Take Charge of Your Health is available on amazon.com.
Jim Pacala, MD, AGS Treasurer, was recently promoted to associate head of the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Minnesota, one of the largest family medicine departments in the country with five core residency programs and over 90 faculty. In his new role, Pacala, an accomplished musician, will have an opportunity to further infuse geriatrics content into family medicine training. His appointment reflects the opportunities that geriatricians in academic medicine have to advance in their careers by taking on larger roles within their own or other institutions.
AGS member Rosanne Leipzig MD, PhD authored “Older Patients: The Universal Gap in Medical Training” for the summer edition of AARP International. In her article, Dr. Leipzig, who is the Gerald and May Ellen Ritter Professor and Vice Chair of Education at the Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Adult Development at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, discusses the challenges that ensue when physicians who lack geriatric training treat their 80 year old patients as they would their 50 year old patients. She also discusses the global lack of geriatrics training for medical students, underscores the difficulties of attracting geriatricians to the field, and calls for geriatric training for all doctors who care for older adults.
“To put it bluntly, geriatrics isn’t seen as a sexy field,” Dr. Leipzig writes. “Dealing with dementia, incontinence, and falls is not quite the same as performing cardiac surgery or a liver transplant.” What’s more, she says, geriatricians are the only subspecialty in the country where a doctor spends additional years of training to make a lower income than peers without a subspecialty.
Yet, Dr. Leipzig notes, “geriatricians’ job satisfaction is very high, ranking first or second among physicians in the United States. Many doctors love the complexity of caring for older people.” But how do we draw more geriatricians to this essential field?
Dr. Leipzig says that “health care system changes that make it easier to practice geriatrics and to provide patients with needed services, as well as appropriate reimbursement for geriatricians” would help draw students to the field. She also calls for all physicians to demonstrate basic geriatric competency before becoming licensed, for more resources and funds for physician training, and that we increase awareness of the need for geriatricians. Read the full article.
Modified On: July 20th, 2010
