The Geriatrics Practice and Teaching Program

Photo taken at the final site visit of the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation representatives to the University of North Carolina Division of Geriatric Medicine, January 2008. From left to right: Dr. Ellen Roberts, Co-Principal Investigator, Dr. Roseanne Leipzig of Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, New York, Dr. Jan Busby-Whitehead, Principal Investigator on the Donald W. Reynolds grant (2003 - 2007), and Rani Snyder, Senior Program Office at the Reynolds Foundation.

In 2003, the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation selected the Center for Aging and Health at UNC-Chapel Hill to receive a $2 million grant to enhance medical school and physician geriatric education in North Carolina. When applying to the Reynolds Foundation for the grant, Center for Aging and Health Director Jan Busby-Whitehead, MD, said, "It represents an ambitious, comprehensive 4-year program that will address all levels of physician education." The university matched the Reynolds money with $1 million.

View training modules created at UNC-CH with Donald W. Reynolds Foundation funds...

Why the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation gives money to institutions that train doctors to treat elderly patients:
"The Foundation launched its Aging and Quality of Life Program in 1996.  Its goal remains improving the quality of life for America’s elderly by preparing physicians to provide better care for them when they become ill.  Most physicians today lack adequate training to meet the needs of the frail elderly patient.  Such patients typically suffer from interacting physical, social and psychological conditions –both acute and chronic – that limit their independence and threaten their capacity to function in daily life."
Donald W. Reynolds webpage, accessed 12/20/2006

Read the 2003 press release announcing the Donald W. Reynolds Grant to the Center for Aging and Health (formerly the Program on Aging).

The overall goal of the grant is to build the capacity of UNC to prepare physician learners at all levels for evidence-based, outcomes-oriented practice in the care of older adults, with the ultimate goal of improving health outcomes for older persons through the state. To achieve this, the Center for Aging and Health designed the following goals.

Undergraduate Geriatric Education: Significantly increase the depth and breadth of geriatrics education in the undergraduate medical school curriculum

Resident Geriatric Education: Integrate an evidence-based, outcomes-oriented approach to geriatric medicine

Increase Geriatricians at UNC: Increase the numbers of faculty, fellows, and preceptors prepared to teach geriatrics

Community Physicians Training: Conduct geriatric educational outcreach to community physicians across the state

By the end of the grant's third year, September 2006, courses and training had been added to the medical school students' and residents curriculum, diagnostic tools were designed for detection of problems common to elders, and planning for the 4th grant year, 2007, includes training for 4th year medical school students in osteoporosis, heart failure, and dementia. A new course in senior women's health has been accepted and installed into the courses that medical students must choose from to achieve their degrees.

The grant has provided support to physician faculty members to train residents to care for acutely ill, hospitalized elders. Faculty mentors train residents about the great importance of preventing functional and cognitive decline during the patients' hospital stays. Older people can develop delirium during hospitalization, which can be a complicating factor in the treatment of the illness that prompted the hospital stay, so residents are trained in avoidance of patient delirium and  to appropriately manage delirium if it develops.

UNC has added four geriatricians to the medical faculty since the grant was awarded in 2003, and plans more additions.

Finally, UNC geriatrician faculty have designed and are doing training modules at physician's offices on two important issues for elders and their doctors: elder mistreatment and the increasingly difficult problem of managing the many medicines that elderly people are often prescribed by numerous physicians...an older person with two or more health conditions can find him or herself in a pharmaceutical hurricane of medicines, many of which may be counteracting others or causing illness that were not there before. Physicians whose medical school training and residency may not have prepared them to sight and address these two issues have hosted the Reynolds-funded training modules at their clinics and reported the sessions to have greatly helped them know best practice for geriatric patients.

The team of UNC-CH physicians and specialists who work on the Reynolds Foundation grant come from the following areas of expertise: geriatrics, family medicine, internal medicine, public health, social medicine, social work, nursing, allied health, rheumatology, biostatistics, and curriculum design and implementation.

Last updated 1/23/2008.