Journal of the American Geriatrics Society
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Multicenter Study
Association between hearing impairment and self-reported difficulty in physical functioning.
To determine whether hearing impairment, defined by using objective audiometry, is associated with multiple categories of self-reported physical functioning in a cross-sectional, nationally representative sample of older adults. ⋯ Hearing impairment in older adults is independently associated with greater disability and limitations in multiple self-reported categories of physical functioning.
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Multicenter Study
Identifying common characteristics of frailty across seven scales.
To determine whether commonly used frailty scales exhibit shared characteristics when applied to a representative sample of middle-aged and older Europeans. ⋯ On each frailty scale, frailty score increased nonlinearly with age, mortality risk increased with frailty score, and women had higher scores than men but demonstrated better survival. Each scale except the frailty phenotype demonstrated an upper limit to frailty below the scale's theoretical maximum. Across commonly used frailty scales, these characteristics are common in nature but differ in magnitude.
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This article describes the curricular milestones for geriatric fellows and the process used to develop them. The curricular milestones were developed to determine what every graduating geriatric fellow should be able to demonstrate to ensure that they will be able to practice effectively and safely in all care settings and with different older adult populations. Three major domains were identified: Caring for the Elderly Patient, Systems-Based Care for Elder Patients, and Geriatric Syndromes. ⋯ These geriatricians represented important stakeholder groups: geriatric fellowship program directors; Association of Directors of Geriatric Academic Programs (ADGAP) members, who are primarily geriatric program and fellowship directors; the American Geriatrics Society (AGS) and ADGAP Education Committee; the AGS Teacher's Section; Geriatric Academic Career Award awardees; and through the American Board of Internal Medicine and the American Board of Family Medicine, board-certified geriatricians who spend more than 50% of their time in clinical practice. The AGS and ADGAP boards approved the final set of 76 Geriatric Curricular Milestones, which were posted on the Portal of Geriatric Online Education in December 2012. These curricular milestones are intended to assist geriatric fellowship directors as they develop curricula and assessments to inform program director reporting to the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education in the Next Accreditation System, which begins in July 2014.
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Entrustable professional activities (EPAs) describe the core work that constitutes a discipline's specific expertise and provide the framework for faculty to perform meaningful assessment of geriatric fellows. This article describes the collaborative process of developing the end-of-training American Geriatrics Society (AGS) and Association of Directors of Geriatric Academic Programs (ADGAP) EPAs for Geriatric Medicine (AGS/ADGAP EPAs). The geriatrics EPAs describes a geriatrician's fundamental expertise and how geriatricians differ from general internists and family practitioners who care for older adults.
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Since 2012, the American Geriatrics Society (AGS) has also been collaborating with the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) Foundation, joining its "Choosing Wisely" campaign on two separate lists of Five Things Healthcare Providers and Patients Should Question. The campaign is designed to engage healthcare organizations and professionals, individuals, and family caregivers in discussions about the safety and appropriateness of medical tests, medications, and procedures. ⋯ Providers then share this information in a published article about these things on the ABIM campaign's website (www.choosingwisely.org). The first AGS list was published in February 2013.