This story written by Jack Sowers originally appeared in the JanFeb 2003 edition of Rounds

Edinburgh Tutorial provides important geriatric medical experience

                                                            
                                           Eric Kagaruki                       Caroline Stevens

     On Oct. 31, OU-COM students Caroline Stevens and Eric Kagaruki shared their experiences as participants last summer in the Charles J. Cannon Edinburgh Geriatric Tutorial in Scotland with the OU-COM community.

     “Geriatric medicine really got started in Great Britain, so our students have an opportunity to receive great training where it originated,” says Barbara Pfeiffer, geriatrics administrator and coordinator of the Edinburgh program.

     “What they do in Edinburgh is very high touch and low-tech, whereas we are pretty high tech in this country.”

     Seeing the health-care system differences between Great Britain and the U.S. helps students gain a deeper perspective about health care for the elderly, Pfeiffer says.

     The Edinburgh experience that tutorial students share with classmates upon their return can benefit all medical students, “because all of them will work with older people unless they go into obstetrics,” Pfeiffer says.

     “Everyone who has done the tutorial has raved about it. No one has come back disappointed.”

     Kagaruki, a fourth-year student currently completing his CORE work at Dayton’s Grandview Medical Center, focused his presentation on what he learned in Scotland about the use of medications among the elderly.

     Stevens, who entered OU- COM after 16 years as a Dayton-area speech pathologist, devoted her presentation to Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment, an interdisciplinary approach to patient management and a core concept in geriatric medicine in Great Britain.

     She used CGA as the basis for comparison of the National Health Service in Great Britain to the health-care model in the U.S. “CGA was incorporated as an entry point for elders into the health-care system in the United Kingdom when the National Health Service was established,” Stevens explained. “Scotland and the rest of the U.K. have had more time to develop the practice of CGA.”

     Stevens will complete her D.O. degree this year. She is currently a preventive medicine/ public health fellow in the Department of Social Medicine.