Mary Tinetti Wins MacArthur "Genius" Grant!

Great news for Geriatrics! For the second consecutive year, a geriatrician has been awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant. Last year, Dr. Diane Meier of Mount Sinai Medical Center and the Center to Advance Palliative Care won for her pioneering work in developing palliative care programs in US hospitals. This year, Dr. Mary Tinetti of Yale won for her work in understanding and preventing falls in the elderly. Congratulations! This is well deserved attention to the stars of our field; great press for geriatrics and palliative care; and for the winners $500,000 isn't bad either...

Comments

Jerry said…

That's welcome and deserved news on several fronts, most notably because Mary's work focuses on a topic that many people, in and out of the health care field, might consider too mundane to even think about.

Of course, a fall, preventable or not, with its many complications, including death, is not at all mundane for the people and families who are affected.

September 22, 2009 at 12:23 PM

Lost in Translation: Google’s Translation of Palliative Care to ‘Do-Nothing Care’

by: Cynthia X. Pan, MD, FACP, AGSF (@Cxpan5X)

My colleagues often ask me: “Why are Chinese patients so resistant to hospice and palliative care?” “Why are they so unrealistic?” “Don’t they understand that death is part of life?” “Is it true that with Chinese patients you cannot discuss advance directives?”

As a Chinese speaking geriatrician and palliative care physician practicing in Flushing, NY, I have cared for countless Chinese patients with serious illnesses or at end of life. Invariably, when Chinese patients or families see me, they ask me if I speak Chinese. When I reply “I do” in Mandarin, the relief and instant trust I see on their faces make my day meaningful and worthwhile.

At my hospital, the patient population is about 30% Asian, with the majority of these being Chinese. Most of these patients require language interpretation. It becomes an interesting challenge and opportunity, as we often need to discuss advance directives, goals of care, and end of life care options…

Delirium: A podcast with Sharon Inouye

In this week's GeriPal podcast we discuss delirium, with a focus on prevention. We are joined by internationally acclaimed delirium researcher Sharon Inouye, MD, MPH. Dr Inouye is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Aging Brain Center in the Institute for Aging Research at Hebrew SeniorLife.

Dr. Inouye's research focuses on delirium and functional decline in hospitalized older patients, resulting in more than 200 peer-reviewed original articles to date. She has developed and validated a widely used tool to identify delirium called the Confusion Assessment Method (CAM), and she founded the Hospital Elder Life Program (HELP) to prevent delirium in hospitalized patients.

We are also joined by guest host Lindsey Haddock, MD, a geriatrics fellow at UCSF who asks a great question about how to implement a HELP program, or aspects of the program, in a hospital with limited resources.

You can also find us on Youtube!

Listen to GeriPal Podcasts on:
iTunes…

Are Palliative Care Providers Better Prognosticators? A Podcast with Bob Gramling

Estimating prognosis is hard and clinicians get very little training on how to do it. Maybe that is one of the reasons that clinicians are more likely to be optimistic and tend to overestimate patient survival by a factor of between 3 and 5. The question is, aren't we better as palliative care clinicians than others in estimating prognosis? This is part of our training and we do it daily. We got to be better, right?

Well, on todays podcast we have Bob Gramling from the Holly and Bob Miller Chair of Palliative Medicine at the University of Vermont to talk about his paper in Journal of Pain and Symptom Management (JPSM) titled “Palliative Care Clinician Overestimation of Survival in Advanced Cancer: Disparities and Association with End of Life Care”.

Big findings from this JPSM paper include that we, like all other clinicians, are an optimistic bunch and that it actually does impact outcomes. In particular, the people whose survival was overestimated by a palliative care c…

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