Introduction

With improvements in modern medicine and increased life span, it is important that all clinicians are equipped to care for older adults. While aging is not a disease, normal physiologic changes that accompany aging make older adults more vulnerable to many conditions. Along with medical conditions, functional status and psychosocial supports should be considered when caring for this population.

Following a report by the Institute of Medicine in the 1970s outlining the needs of older adults, the field of geriatrics was born. Geriatric care requires interprofessional collaboration. To understand what a geriatrician does, one needs to think of the geriatric 5Ms:

• Mind: mentation, dementia, delirium, depression
• Mobility: impaired gait and balance; fall-injury prevention
• Medications: polypharmacy, deprescribing; optimal prescribing; adverse medication effects and medication burden
• Multicomplexity: multimorbidity; complex biopsychosocial situations
• Matters most: each individual’s own meaningful health-outcome goals and care preferences
  
  

The topics covered are organized as follows:

• Falls
• Frailty
• Dementia
• Delirium
• Medication Management
• Geriatric Assessment
  
  

Other important topics related to geriatrics are covered in the following rotation guides:

• Palliative Care
• Delivering Bad News (Patient Communication)
• ICU Delirium (Critical Care)
• Depression, Anxiety (Mental Health)
• Symptom Management (Oncology)