Special journal issue provides new ways to address current struggles in geriatric medical education

Gerontology & Geriatrics Education, the Official Journal of the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education (AGHE), has published Special Issue - Building Capacity in Geriatrics: Innovative Approaches in Medical Education to provide new and innovative ways to address the current struggles in geriatric medical education.

The need for a larger number of trained physicians in the care of older adults is higher than ever as the number of older adults within the population continues to rise. While there have been strides made in both undergraduate and graduate geriatric medical education, there is still a struggle with recruiting students into the field and getting non-geriatricians to learn the differences between caring for 50 year olds verses 80 year olds.

In this issue, medical students, residents, hospitalists, and nursing home physicians are asked to describe how their experience of caring for older persons differs from what they have learned to do within traditional medicine. The articles chosen for the Special Issue include methods for teaching clinical geriatrics despite limitations in curricular time and geriatric specialists, non-geriatrician recognition of the differences between geriatrics and traditional medicine, and opportunities to enhance geriatrics competencies for practicing physicians. 

There are many barriers to developing a physician workforce that can ably care for older adults. In recent years innovative strategies have been developed and tested to address this problem; however, there have been limited outlets for sharing these approaches. "This issue shows the benefit of disseminating the lessons learned from these smaller studies, providing us with ideas that might translate to our own environments and allow greater training in geriatrics despite the limited numbers of geriatricians," write Sara M. Bradley and Rosanne M. Leipzig in the Introductory Editorial to the Special Issue.