The Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog profiles an interesting partnership between nursing home operator Hebrew SeniorLife and local colleges that allows students in the areas of medicine, social work, dental school and business to complete internships and the company’s Hebrew Rehabilitation Center facility. Here’s a link and an excerpt:
For the first time this year, all second-year Harvard medical students are doing two-week rotations through Hebrew SeniorLife’s nursing homes, learning how to examine patients. Boston University sends its dental students, Boston College and University of Massachusetts send nursing students, and Simmons College social-work students pass through as well. All told, some 750 students rotate through the group’s biggest nursing home, Hebrew Rehabilitation Center.
And this spring, Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management is announcing a new concentration in aging services for its MBA program, giving students training in managing geriatric services at Hebrew SeniorLife.
At the other end of the pay scale, Hebrew SeniorLife offers nurse aides a day off a week, plus training, remedial classes and child-care, to work toward becoming a licensed practical nurse, or LPN. It isn’t cheap: A state grant pays $250,000 of the costs, and donations cover the remaining $200,000, says Len Fishman, Hebrew SeniorLife’s president and CEO. “It’s a way of saying to people, long-term-care is not a dead end.”
Such arrangements are rare, largely thanks to the cost – and staffing pressures. “The first thing you need are patients, and the second thing you need are health-care professionals who have a spare moment to be providing high-quality teaching,” Fishman, a former New Jersey Commissioner of Health and Senior Services, tells Health Blog. “Most long-term-care facilities are small; they don’t have medical staffs.”
Ultimately, as Baby Boomers age, much of the slack will have to be taken up by non-specialists. It’ll help if docs and others remember that, unlike some kinds of medical specialties, geriatrics is more about juggling a patient’s many conditions and risks. Does the chance that a drug makes a patient dizzy and raises their chance of falling outweigh the benefit from lowering their blood-pressure?
“Physicians are interested in what causes the problem, but the patients are interested in what the problem will cause in their lives,” says Fredrick T. Sherman, a professor of geriatrics and medicine at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York. “What they really want us to do is to maintain and improve their function.”
