Section of Geriatrics
From left to right: Dr. Lydia Rolita, Tene Washington, (Program Coordinator), Drs. Nana Makalatia, David Sutin, Saima Ajmal (Associate Program Director), Alexander Kolessa, Bryant Nguyen, Laleh Moazen, and Scott Sherman (Program Director), in the Bellevue Hospital center atrium. Faculty not pictured: Drs. Eszter Boksay, Adam Karp, Sharmin Khan, Sathya Maheswaran, Michael Perskin, Basit Qayyum, Marie Sedlackova, and Smitha Shetty.
Fellowship Director—Geriatrics: Scott Sherman, MD, MPH
The Geriatrics section comprises several distinct units:
- Bellevue Hospital Geriatric Clinic provides inpatient and outpatient geriatrics care
- Manhattan VA Medical Center New York has a geriatrics clinic and a home-based primary care service
- Hospital for Joint Diseases maintains a falls prevention program
- Tisch Hospital has an inpatient geriatric consult service
- Gouverneur, the most recent addition, is a nursing home that is part of NYC Health & Hospitals Corporation
In the early 1970s, two programs addressing the needs of disadvantaged elderly patients were launched at NYU: an outreach program for elderly patients living in SRO hotels and a psychiatry outreach program for de-institutionalized elderly patients with dementia.
These two programs were brought together in the Bellevue Hospital Geriatric Clinic when a new Division of Geriatrics was established in 1979 within the Department of Medicine. Over the next twenty years, an inpatient unit at Bellevue was added, followed by a Geriatrics clinic at the VA, a Geriatrics clinic and falls program at the Hospital for Joint Diseases, a home care program at the Manhattan VA Hospital, and a consult team at Tisch University Hospital.
A Geriatric Fellowship Program was started in 1981, one of the first ten such programs in the United States.
The aim of the Geriatrics fellowship program is to prepare internists to care for the frail elderly in diverse settings, and to develop the skills necessary for successful careers as clinician-educators or investigators. To date, the majority of graduated fellows are associated with academic medical centers.
The Geriatrics fellowship program is accredited for one year of clinical training, with an optional second year for fellows pursuing research interests (the norm among Geriatrics fellowship programs in the U.S.).
A total of six fellowship positions exist:
The fellowship includes clinical rotations in outpatient and inpatient geriatric care, as well as nursing home, home-based and palliative care. Fellows attend weekly Geriatrics Grand Rounds, Medicine Grand Rounds, Geriatrics Journal Club and an array of conferences specific to the site of their clinical rotations. A comprehensive curriculum covers clinical geriatrics, research methodology and statistics, aging in society, nursing home regulations and ethics. Fellows are active in the teaching of medical students, residents, nursing students, and social work students. All fellows undertake a research project during the year and present their work at a national, regional, or local meeting. No training grant currently supports the fellowship in Geriatrics.