Undergraduate training in geriatric medicine: getting it right

It is pehaps inevitable that every specialty within medicine believes that its fundamental principles should be included in the core undergraduate curriculum and should be accompanied by a compulsory placement. The General Medical Council's (GMC) policy document ‘Tomorrow's Doctors’ [ 1 ] stresses the importance of students learning about the special problems associated with older people's health. For example, it states that young doctors must respect age and the vulnerability of particular patient groups including older people. They also emphasise that graduates must understand human development, which includes growing old. Importantly, the document states that students must have opportunities to interact with a range of people including visiting an older person, a learning experience that is now included in many curricula. However, they are silent on the issue of whether there should be a compulsory attachment to a geriatric medicine unit, as indeed they are, about other hospital specialties. The present policy suggests that a quarter to a third of the curriculum should be based on student-selected components. The interpretation and implementation of such advice will be different in each medical school but the risk is, that at this time of demographic change, with growing numbers of older people, and with other demands on the curriculum, exposure to geriatric medicine might be overlooked and reduced.