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A Visit from Fellows...and Musings on Advancing Care Across Specialties

By Nancy Lundebjerg posted 07-18-2019 01:51 PM

  

Last Friday, we hosted the Mount Sinai #Geriatrics and #GeriPal fellows in the AGS offices. It was fun and informative (at least I thought so, and I hope the fellows agree!). 

One of the questions we fielded was about the upcoming launch of the American College of Surgeons (ACS) Geriatric Surgery Verification and Quality Improvement Program at their annual quality conference. Had we seen the article in the New York Times and what did we think about it? I quipped that I suspected we hadn’t been mentioned (we hadn’t) and then went on to talk about the AGS’s long-standing focus on improving the ability of surgical and related medical specialists to care for older people through our Geriatrics-for-Specialists Initiative (GSI). I noted the launch of the ACS Geriatric Surgery Verification and Quality Improvement Program comes hard on the heels of a site visit focused on the work of the Geriatrics Emergency Department Collaborative (GEDC) and the Geriatric Emergency Department Accreditation Program that the American College of Emergency Physicians launched in 2018. To round this short list of ways the AGS GSI has fostered innovation leading to improved clinical care in the acute care setting, there also is our own AGS CoCare: Ortho, a co-management model improving care of older adults with hip fracture. 

I can remember the day when we got a letter from the American Board of Surgery (see photo) in September 2000 indicating that the Board made changes to its certification standards in response to statement of principles from our AGS GSI Interdisciplinary Group. The AGS GSI leadership was “over the moon” with this news, even as we recognized we could do more but needed to create champions. We set out to do that through the Dennis W. Jahnigen Career Development Awards program, which by design included an emphasis on leadership development. That emphasis has continued in the Grants for Early Medical/Surgical Specialists’ Transition to Aging Research (GEMSSTAR) award, which the National Institute on Aging offers to emerging investigators (applications for the next cohort, due Oct. 2, can be found here). 

I would be remiss if I didn’t note the importance of our partners in achieving these advances: The John A. Hartford Foundation, the Atlantic Philanthropies, West Health, and the National Institute on Aging all have invested in programs focused on improving care for older adults (including programs here at AGS). The specialty societies that have joined us are no less important to our efforts, and I look forward to our continued partnership even as we hit these major milestones. 

To my mind, the most important element of our success is engagement with the specialty leaders and their geriatrician partners, who champion improving the care of older adults across health care. You know who you are, and I hope you also know that I am #AGSProud of the work you are doing.

Interested in learning more about the work of the AGS GSI and the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine (AAIM), which has been focused on improving care of older adults in surgical, internal medicine, and other specialties? We’ve got a virtual JAGS issue for that, found here.

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