CELEBRATING THIRTY YEARS OF AGING
AND HEALTH 2012 ANNUAL REPORT
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PROMOTE INTERDISCIPLINARY TEAM CARE

1983

Geriatric Interdisciplinary Team Training

1995-2004 First-rate geriatric care is, by definition, team care, and incorporates the expertise of many health professionals to implement treatment across clinical settings. Effective teamwork has been shown to enhance quality of care, improve patient safety, and reduce medication errors, while making the duties of health professionals more personally rewarding and efficiently delivered. But health care professionals rarely receive training in team care. Instead, education programs tend to follow strict disciplinary lines.

The Geriatric Interdisciplinary Team Training (GITT) initiative awarded $13.3 million to eight demonstration projects and a national coordinating center to develop and disseminate models for team training.

It was challenging for this work to be sustained after private funding for GITT ended. Education programs in medicine, nursing, and social work largely resisted the changes needed and health care systems were not demanding team training. This did not completely thwart efforts to promote team-based education; it just took time.

In 2009, an InterProfessional Education Collaborative (consisting of health professional associations such as the American Association of Colleges of Nursing and the Association of American Medical Colleges) released core competencies for interprofessional collaborative practice.

The GITT initiative created national training models based on partnerships between health care providers of geriatric care and educational institutions, including Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas (above), and Rush Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago (below). What I love about the Hartford Foundation is that it’s not about advancing an institution or a discipline; it’s about drawing upon all of them to move the work of improving care of older adults forward.” Nancy L. Wilson, MA, LMSW
Assistant Professor, Geriatrics Section
Department of Medicine and the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy
Project Director
Geriatric Interdisciplinary Team Training Initiative
Baylor College of Medicine
(Above) Nancy L. Wilson, MA LMSW Explains GITT, Houston Tx

(Below) GIT in Practice: Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City

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