Medical schools must consider innovative ways to ensure that graduates are prepared to care for the aging population. One way is to offer a geriatrics clerkship as an option for the fulfillment of a medical school's internal medicine rotation requirement. The authors' purpose was to evaluate the geriatrics clerkship's impact on internal medicine…

Medical school accreditation requirements require educational opportunities in geriatrics. Twenty-six minimum graduating competencies in geriatrics have recently been identified for medical students. The authors describe how these competencies are being integrated into a new medical curriculum through coursework and community-based experiences.…

The authors describe the prevalence, formation, maintenance, and evaluation of student aging interest groups. They conducted a cross-sectional electronic survey of the 46 academic medical centers funded by the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation. To evaluate their group of approximately 50 students, the authors conducted an electronic pretest and…

Virtual worlds could offer inexpensive and safe three-dimensional environments in which medical trainees can learn to identify home safety hazards. Our aim was to evaluate the feasibility, usability, and acceptability of virtual worlds for geriatric home safety assessments and to correlate performance efficiency in hazard identification with…

Quality improvement (QI) initiatives are critical in the care of older adults who are more vulnerable to substandard care. QI education meets aspects of core Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education competencies and prepares learners for the rising focus on performance measurement in health care. The authors developed, implemented, and…

Medical Readers' Theater (MRT) is an innovative and simple way of helping medical students to reflect on difficult-to-discuss topics in geriatrics medical education, such as aging stereotypes, disability and loss of independence, sexuality, assisted living, relationships with adult children, and end-of-life issues. The authors describe a required…

Aging Couple Across the Curriculum is a unique program designed around a couple who "age" a decade with each year of medical school. In these half-day sessions, students encounter the aging couple through a standardized patient experience. Interactive breakout sessions conducted by multidisciplinary professionals enhance student learning and…

This study assesses how effective classroom sessions are at teaching geriatric competencies to medical students. At Stony Brook Medical School, most geriatric competencies are taught in the Ambulatory Care Clerkship during small-group educational sessions. Clinical exposure to reinforce these specialized skills varies with preceptor assignment. A…

Medical graduates require positive attitudes toward older people with cognitive impairment, in addition to knowledge and skills in the diagnosis and management of dementia. The Student Training Project in Dementia (STriDE) project was conducted to ensure that these needs are met through curricula in Western Australian medical schools. Two medical…

In order to characterize use of the Internet in medical geriatrics education programs, 130 medical education programs in the U.S. that train medical students, interns, residents, fellows and practicing physicians were asked to complete a survey developed by the Consortium of E-Learning in Geriatrics Instruction (CELGI). Sixty-eight programs…

Virginia Commonwealth University developed an enhanced medical student geriattic curriculum that includes required home visits and nursing home visits for second year students (180 per year), an annual Forum on Aging for all first and second year students, and small group exercises. We added 30 hours of basic science material to pre-clinical…

Geriatric patients are at increased risk for complications from delirium or falls during hospitalization. Medical education, however, generally places little emphasis on the hazards of hospitalization for older inpatients. Geriatricians conducted a faculty development workshop for hospitalists about the hazards of hospitalization for geriatric…

The University of Miami Miller School of Medicine (UMMSM) has developed and implemented a competency-based undergraduate medical education (UME) curriculum that targets 61 learning objectives for three geriattic syndromes: dementia, falls, and delirium. This curriculum redesign changed the educational focus from what is taught to what is learned.…

We redesigned our medical school's Problem-Based Learning (PBL) curriculum to include a substantial increase in required geriatrics content. Innovations included new PBL health care problems and standardized patients (SPs) throughout the first three years and a new required four-week, fourth-year rotation. We used data from the AAMC Medical School…

Over the last 20 years, older people have served as teachers for students as part of the formal curriculum in geriatrics at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. In recent years, we have supported a more in-depth, longitudinal experience that connects medical students with elders in the community. The program was initiated as a special…