It seems our local hospital, while it does provide eg.
rehabillitation, and eg. stroke care does not actually have a
specialist geriatrician any more.
Geriatrics at Oxford seems from the Internet to have some fancy new
name and to be led by someone whose entire focus seems stroke care.
The solution to the care of complex elderly patients with multiple
needs seems to be to a) ignore them, and b) de-medicalise them - even
when they have conditions recognizable as diseases in any other group.
Their needs may demand the highest standards of holistic, person
centred care (if not the same knowledge base as IVs, ventilators and
ITU / NICU pts) but instead the standard view is that they should be
looked after by people who are not trained nurses, either RGN or
psychiatric nurses (for dementia, depression etc.)
With the current financial crisis things are only likely to get worse
- is there an answer?
Googling on geriatrics and psychogeriatrics seems to suggest that
these specialities had their heyday in the 1980s and 1990s and are
now on the way out...., are GPs with (3 months) geriatric experience
all that's left now?
Julian
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