On my block in Brooklyn, we have a great mixture of people of all ages—young families with kids, empty nesters, young old, and old old. While the young families tend to be transient, many of the long-time residents have raised their children, supported the community, and are now aging in…
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Our heartiest congratulations to Dr. Nancy Whitelaw, PhD, for winning the 2009 Elizabeth Fries Health Education Award! Each year, the James F. and Sarah T. Fries Foundation presents the $25K prize to a health educator who has made a substantial contribution to advancing the field of health education or…
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There’s a scourge in our midst about to kill off any hope that geriatric medicine will grow any larger than it already is. (Oh, right, it’s already shrinking.) I’m not talking about H1N1, but a hard-to-kill and pervasive parochialism about how geriatrics fellowship programs go about recruiting. I’ll call it…
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When we talk about what we do at the Foundation, we often get asked, "What are you doing for caregivers?" This puzzles me in two different ways. First, I need to figure out which of the many caregivers is meant: the family and friends who provide care to their loved…
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Recently I got my follow-up post card that I filled out at our interdisciplinary scholars communications training held in July 2009 in Chicago. See below. If you can read my writing, you can see the lessons that I took from the training and wanted to try to implement in my…
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"I want to recruit you!" Regardless of your view about the proper role of geriatrics specialists - direct service providers or researchers/educators - the fact remains that we need more of them. As we succeed in setting higher standards for competence among generalists in caring for older adults in medicine…
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One of our challenges is getting to the heart of geriatrics--what is expert geriatric care like, and why would you want it for yourself or loved ones? A previous post drew on a description of the geriatric care delivered at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and helped me…
Read full postAre care management programs finally gaining some traction? On September 30, Dr. Thomas Bodenheimer of the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine praising programs that reduce the cost of caring for older adults with multiple chronic conditions. Dr…
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Fundamentally, the Foundation’s mission is to make the nation’s health care system more responsive to the needs of its population. In our view, the growth of a population of older adults and the growing burden of chronic disease and complexity that come with them pose challenges that require us to…
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A common complaint about philanthropy is that it lacks the focus and patience to provide sufficient resources over enough time to have a realistic chance of achieving social change. In other words, in the garden of social innovation we are accused of sprinkling our resources too lightly, producing a garden…
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