APA's Monitor on Psychology: Working with Older Adults
The American Psychological Association (APA) has published an article in their December 2018 issue of Monitor on Psychology, "Working with Older Adults."
The article notes that only 1.2% of psychologists specialize in geropsychology. "In response, psychology is boosting its efforts to prepare more psychologists to treat older adults, focusing not only on creating specialists but also on training all psychologists on the special needs of this population. This training is particularly essential as the country continues to move toward "age-friendly health systems," an approach that focuses on the 4Ms: mobility, medications, mentation/mental activity, and what matters."
"This initiative has a goal of having 20 percent of all health systems in the United States age-friendly by 2020," says Erin Emery-Tiburcio, PhD, co-director of the Center for Excellence in Aging, Rush University Medical Center, chair of APA’s Committee on Aging (CONA). "That’s an aggressive rollout, and we need to make sure psychologists—including generalists and those in subfields that regularly work with older adults such as rehabilitation psychology, clinical neuropsychology and clinical health psychology—are involved with this and informing the whole health-care team about how to meet the mental health needs of older adults."
To read the article, click here.
To learn more about the Age-Friendly Health Systems initiative, click here.