STRATEGIC PLANNING MEETING CHARTS COURSE TO GUARANTEE FUTURE OF HIGH-QUALITY CARE FOR OLDER ADULTS

The American Geriatrics Society’s Board of Directors recently approved a strategic plan to help ensure that the nation’s growing population of older adults gets the high-quality care it needs and deserves, now and in the future. Aimed at improving the quality of health care for older adults in all settings, and promoting geriatrics in all disciplines, the plan outlines several key projects, including:

• Defining core competencies for health professionals caring for older adults
• Developing materials to help patients and their families understand the elements of quality geriatric care, and how to obtain such care
• Establishing requirements to ensure competence in the care of older adults in a greater number of health profession training programs
• Creating comprehensive leadership education programs for geriatrics health care professionals
• Reforming payment policy as a means of encouraging health care professionals to provide high-quality care for older adults
• Developing and proposing mechanisms for loan forgiveness for physicians and other health care professionals entering geriatrics
• Developing and articulating clear messages about, and advocating for, geriatrics research, and attracting promising candidates to geriatrics disciplines

Within the next couple of months, the Society will appoint interdisciplinary committees, teams, and other advisory groups responsible for bringing these important projects to fruition. The Strategic Planning Task Force that conceived these projects drafted broadstrokes, working descriptions of, and recommendations for, each and will rely on these committees, teams, and groups to develop detailed plans for their implementation. The Task Force, for example, agreed that the group involved in identifying core competencies for professionals caring for older adults should also develop accepted definitions of standards for use in evaluating training and care.

The specifics, however, would be up to the group, which would include geriatrics health care providers from all disciplines. In a similar vein, the Task Force agreed that reforming payment policy to encourage health care professionals to provide high-quality care should involve several strategies. Among other things, these could include continuing to advocate for payment policy that recognizes the complexity of providing eldercare; assuring that measures appropriate for geriatric care are included in pay-for-performance programs; and lobbying for legislative solutions for payment reform in geriatric care (eg, a geriatric and chronic care management act).

Each of the projects the Task Force outlined is multidisciplinary. The group overseeing the loan forgiveness project, for instance, would develop and propose mechanisms of loan forgiveness for physicians, clinical pharmacists, advanced practice nurses, nurse practitioners, and others entering geriatrics. Some of the projects, however, involve a stepwise approach. The team responsible for developing, promoting, and disseminating a “recruitment toolkit,” for example, would first develop such a tool for use in recruiting primary care residents to the field. The next step would involve identifying potential partners for adapting the recruiting toolkit for use by other disciplines.

The AGS’ goal is to complete all of these projects within the next three years—an ambitious deadline. To meet it, the AGS plans to start appointing committee and advisory group members this month. If you are an AGS member and are interested in getting involved in these projects, or simply sharing your suggestions, please let us know by filling out the “Future of Geriatric Medicine Membership Survey.” The AGS is already working on numerous related initiatives, of course. And we’re making headway.

To offer just one example: The AGS and the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry worked together to get bipartisan loan forgiveness legislation introduced in the House: Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) recently introducedÊa proposal that provides loan repayment incentives to encourage more physicians to pursue training in geriatrics.ÊAnd we’re already taking the next step with this: working to get that legislation introduced in the Senate. Stay tuned. Regards,