Get healthcare providers to improve care together, that’s the challenge

Noor Heim is an assistant professor who currently works for the University Medical Center in Utrecht. In this blog, she discusses her recent Age & Ageing paper on research she has done in the Leiden University Medical Center.

Integration of treatment and care from multiple disciplines is particularly critical in care for older people. Most older people admitted to a hospital suffer from more than just one (chronic) condition. As a consequence, coherent care for older patients involves more than just one discipline. Furthermore, the fact that patients are discharged from hospital quicker and sicker, with higher demands of care, increases the need for integration of (transitional) care between settings. Given the number of older adults who permanently lose the ability to perform one or more activities of daily living during and after a hospital admission, one has to conclude things need to be improved. However, it has proven challenging to accomplish improvements and maybe even harder to study (and to quantify) the benefits of the efforts taken.

How might health deficits in cells scale up to become clinically visible?

Prof Kenneth Rockwood is Director of Geriatric Medicine Research at Dalhousie University, Canada and serves on the International Advisory Panel of Age and Ageing journal. 

A July Age and Ageing paper on frailty considered how subcellular damage might “scale up” to lead to clinically detectable deficits. In December, a paper from Biogerontology addressed how deficits originate, and how they might scale.  The proposed answer appears to be powerful and offers some insights into how to think about frailty and disease in older adults.