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Geriatric Medicine Fellowship

The top-ranked geriatric medicine fellowship (subspecialty residency) program at Saint Louis University provides comprehensive exposure to the full range of practice settings and clinical scenarios seen in older adults, emphasizing clinical medicine and quality improvement.

Entrance into the program requires completing an Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME)-accredited residency program in internal medicine or family medicine. Successful completion of our program confers eligibility for certification of added qualifications by the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) and the American Board of Family Medicine.

Program Highlights

Medical students and house staff from residency programs in internal medicine throughout the St. Louis area regularly rotate through our clinics and inpatient service. This affords our fellows excellent teaching opportunities.

Our faculty members are known around the country and the world as leading experts in geriatric research, teaching and care. Our faculty are featured speakers at national and international forums in geriatric medicine and long-term care.

Our research portfolio includes funded research in the basic science of Alzheimer's disease using a senescent mouse model, and quality improvement studies of applying geriatric principles in acute care, outpatient care and long-term care.

The division partners with the Gateway Geriatric Education Center (GEC) in providing community outreach and training that addresses caregiver support, dementia education and social isolation among rural and inner-city older adults through the $2.5 million NIH-funded Geriatric Workforce Education Project (GWEP.) The fellowship benefits from the unique collaboration with the Geriatric Psychiatry fellowship headed by Dr. George Grossberg.

Our faculty members consistently present at conferences worldwide and participate on the boards of directors for national geriatrics organizations, including AMDA and AGS. Our faculty have leadership roles in the top professional journals in the field. Fellows are encouraged to participate in reviewer and editorial training.

Our fellowship includes a weekly one-hour boards review, topical didactics lecture, and a second-hour presentation, usually by outside experts for Geriatrics Grand Rounds. Geriatricians from around the region often sign in to participate. There is also a monthly journal club presented by the fellows and hosted by the faculty in their homes to promote our mutual support.

Key Strengths of Our Program

  • Consistently listed as one of the top geriatrics programs in the country by U.S. News & World Report since 1998.
  • Strong core clinical faculty consistently rated Best Doctors in St. Louis.
  • Trainees experience a wide range of clinical care and physician leadership at various sites of care, including home care, assisted living, skilled nursing facility, office-based and hospital consultation, hospital trauma surgery comanagement, geriatric inpatient and outpatient psychiatry, inpatient rehabilitation at the VA, hospice and palliative care.
  • Fellows become independent practitioners for the care of complex older adults by practicing in rigorous and supervised settings.
  • Our fellows have gone on to succeed in a variety of practice and leadership roles. Several have further specialized by qualifying in second disciplines including endocrinology, hematology-oncology, gastroenterology and health systems management.
  • Fellows care for longitudinal panels in outpatient, Assisted Living and LTC preparing them for independent geriatrics specialty practice.
  • Fellows must implement one quality-improvement project as fellows and are encouraged to present QI and research results at local and national meetings. The division supports fellows to attend at least one national meeting during their training year.

Educational Goals

The program ensures that by the end of the 12-month accredited training, our fellows have completed their A.B.I.M. or A.A.F.P. board certification exams and can practice competently and independently in geriatric medicine and be eligible for the board certification examination in geriatric medicine.

The fellow will achieve this by:

  • Serving as the primary care provider for patients seen in continuity settings.
  • Consulting or co-managing geriatric medicine patients in the acute care setting.
  • Managing patients in subacute and long-term care settings.
  • Performing geriatric medicine consultations across the spectrum of acuity.
  • Managing geriatric psychiatry, rehabilitation and hospice/palliative care conditions.
  • Performing the components of a comprehensive geriatric medicine assessment and determinations of decisional capacity when necessary.

General Information and Benefits

Fellows work at scheduled rotations from Monday to Friday. Fellows cover weekend hospital call only when on the hospital consult service and in-patient geriatric psychiatry rotation.

Night call consists of telephone coverage from home for outpatients and nursing facilities from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. in the regular faculty rotation. Fellows will cover an average of no more than one call night per week and one weekend call per month. When on call, the fellows have attending backup.

Benefits

Please visit the Saint Louis University Graduate Medical Education page for full benefits information.

Additional benefits we offer to fellows include:

  • Support to attend one of two geriatrics conferences during their training year, including the Future's Program at the annual meeting of AMDA - The Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine.
  • Free membership to AMDA and discounted membership to the American Geriatrics Society.
  • Office in the medical school building equipped with personal computers, a variety of geriatrics texts and the Geriatric Review Syllabus.
  • Access to the Saint Louis University libraries.

Where We Work