Medical Students and Foundation Year Doctors

Welcome to this section for medical students and Foundation Year 1 and Foundation Year 2 doctors who have an interest in older people's healthcare.

Frail old people are the greatest users of the NHS and geriatric medicine is the biggest specialty within the Royal Colleges of Physicians.

For a long time, geriatric medicine was the "Cinderella" specialty among both doctors and health professionals allied to medicine. As students and doctors, one will frequently hear derogatory terms applied to these patients but the fact is that geriatric medicine brings to medicine in general a unique body of knowledge and has an inestimable impact on the lives of older people and on the state budget in its ability to mitigate some of the effects of ageing, to add quality and even independence to older people's lives.

The BGS now welcomes as members, medical students and foundation year doctors with an interest in this challenging and satisfying area of medicine. We encourage students to enter our essay prize competitions and we encourage both students and foundation year doctors to submit abstracts to our biannual scientific meetings where they may meet prominent, experienced consultant physicians in elderly care, who will give them constructive advice on their research.

Why geriatric medicine?

Geriatric medicine is an exciting and rapidly growing specialty in which the UK is world leader – Marjory Warren pioneered the rehabilitation of the ‘incurable elderly’ in the 1930s and Sir Ferguson Anderson was the world’s first professor of geriatric medicine in Glasgow in the 1960s. The specialty is now the largest in hospital medicine and retains a strong academic base.

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What Should We be Teaching Our Undergraduates About Ageing?

The over 65s comprise between 15 per cent and 18 per cent of admissions to UK Emergency Departments^1-2 and two-thirds of acute hospital inpatients in England and Wales and 36 per cent of acute admissions are over 65³.

The impact of frailty in determining the workload of doctors has been acknowledged across specialties as diverse as general practice (NHS long-term conditions framework⁴) and elective surgical specialties such as the National Confidential Enquiry into Perioperative Deaths⁵ (NCEPOD).

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Undergraduate Medical Curriculum

In Tomorrow’s Doctors 2003 the GMC emphasise the need for medical graduates to meet the principles of professional medical practice as set out in "Good medical practice" and identified the knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviour expected of all new graduates.

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