Multiprofessional Medical Teaching Unit on Geriatrics
MULTIPROFFESIONAL MEDICAL TEACHING UNIT ON GERIATRICS
The constitution of the UDM, within the scope of the Clinical Management Area, provides added value from the teaching point of view. Our action plan focuses on the following steps:
- Initial incorporation of the speciality of geriatric nursing.
- Extension to the training of the speciality of geriatric medicine (when the speciality is recognised as such in our community).
- Assessment of the inclusion of more professionals in the event that they are developed (PIR,...).
Key points of the Teaching Unit
- Clearly interdisciplinary organisation including specialists in geriatrics, nursing, rehabilitation, physiotherapy, other clinical specialties related to the elderly.
- Well-defined evaluation culture.
- Well-established culture of quality and client-centricity.
- Organisation by key processes that concentrate the burden of hospital care for the elderly.
- Conception of training and research as a key process within the organisation.
Both specialities (specialist in Geriatrics and specialist in geriatric nursing) share elementary common bases, so that their inclusion within the same device, the UDM, and together with undergraduate teaching in ageing and health, enhance the final individual results of each of them. The concepts of atypical disease presentation, frailty, iatrogenesis, importance of disability avoidance and reversal, etc., are key in both cases.
The emphasis on "treatments" by the specialist physicians and "care" by the specialist nurses provide the differential aspects, which are well highlighted in the training programme standard and in the adapted teaching programme provided.
The programme will be adapted to the needs of each trainee, but in no case will the trainee be considered exempt from knowledge of the situation at the different levels of care at which an elderly person may be placed. The itinerary must provide knowledge of the patient's location - community, residence, hospital - and their clinical and functional characteristics.
The ultimate goal of the geriatric nursing programme is to train "excellent" case managers who are versatile and adaptable to the different situations of an elderly person's illness.