Geriatrics Fellowship

Curriculum

The Department of Family Medicine at East Carolina University offers comprehensive fellowships in geriatrics for board-certified physicians in family medicine or general internal medicine. The fellowship is accredited by The Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). The one-year fellowship is designed to prepare individuals for the full-time practice of all aspects of geriatric medicine and to act as a geriatric consultant for the medical community. The program was established in 1984 and was one of the first accredited geriatric programs in the country in 1988.

The program encompasses care of older adults from the entire continuum of care, including independent living, rest home, assisted living, and nursing home sites. Fellows rotate through 12 structured monthly rotations of patient care and teaching in the nursing home, inpatient and outpatient rehabilitation center, university hospital, and ambulatory geriatric clinic. Didactic presentations and seminars are designed for each site.

Fellows provide direct patient care, have primary clinical responsibilities in all clinical settings, and are under the direct supervision of the geriatrics faculty. Seminars are held weekly and cover a wide range of topics. Fellows spend approximately 90 percent of their time in clinically related activities, with two geriatric continuity clinics a week.

As part of the faculty development fellowship, fellows learn grant writing, curriculum development, teaching and administrative skills. With a faculty mentor, fellows develop and complete a research project. The results will be presented as a poster at the American Geriatrics Society meeting.