Complex Interprofessional Care 3 Credits/Maximum of 3

Catalog description

This rotation involves spending one week with the Division of Geriatrics faculty caring for patients in post-acute care and skilled nursing facilities providing primary care for medically complex older adults, and performing dementia care consultations in the outpatient memory clinic. This week will focus on learning how to perform: a) appropriate geriatric patient assessments, including but not limited to mental status examinations, capacity assessments, frailty assessments, assisting with end-of-life decision making (including surrogate decision making and futility assessments), b) functional assessments, and c) building knowledge about healthy aging processes. It will also include reflection on the benefits/challenges with coordination of care across care settings and how to collaborate with interdisciplinary team members to maximize independence and deliver optimal, safe, age-friendly care. Another week is spent embedded in the Cancer Institute experiencing patient care delivered at the infusion center, the interdisciplinary CARE Center, and the oncology clinics. Through these experiences, students will not only learn about healthy aging versus aging with medical complexity, but they will also gain insight into key systems science and humanities principles such as coordination of care, interdisciplinary teaming, ethics at the end of life (including advance care planning, futility assessments, capacity assessments, and surrogate decision making), and the challenges of current health system structures and processes. Students will work directly with multiple different team members, including psychologists, advanced practice providers, and physicians to learn how multidisciplinary institutes deliver multifaceted, optimal patient care in one setting. Students will also attend tumor boards and grand rounds at the Cancer Institute which are ideal settings to learn essential coordination of care and clinical reasoning skills. Through experiences in both contexts, students will be challenged to understand their patients as persons navigating complex health systems in relation to their own unique circumstances and life stories. In order to closely approximate the schedule students will have when they become attending physicians, the schedule is comprised of half days of experiences. Students will have 2-3 half days with no assigned clinical duties during which they are expected to complete the assessments outlined below.