Education, Training and Careers

Dr Duncan Forsyth’s co-authored book is one of the best specialty certificate examination (SCE) geriatrics books on the market. In fact, it is one of the only SCE geriatrics books on the market.

The leadership and enthusiasm of the BGS Scottish Council, along with the support of the BGS conference team, ensured that the BGS Scottish Spring Meeting was back on the calendar for 2021. 

Even as a medical student I was drawn to elderly patients, but as a Senior House Officer (SHO) in a busy London hospital I soon found that I did not thrive on the acute ward.

Who do you think wrote the best poem on ageing? Could it be Yeats, Keats, Frost, Cope, Barrett Browning, Wordsworth, or even Shakespeare? 

Do you dare to care? We have typically been called into our professional roles because we want to directly care for others. If not, we might have been technicians or scientists instead of healthcare professionals.

Would I recommend the role? 100% yes! It really has been a brilliant opportunity! I have felt warmly invited into the BGS family and have also loved getting to know the other trainee officers in the other roles on the council.

I was delighted and intrigued when I first heard about Emergence, an anthology of prose and poetry related to ageing, all nominated by clinicians working with older adults in Ireland. 

The benefits of using podcasts as tools for learning and reflection in undergraduate and professional settings are now well documented. Podcasts provide mobile, accessible content which can be supplementary and complementary to the more formal and established ways of learning that we have been used to, and more people are discovering these benefits all the time.

I talk about frailty a lot. I hear the word ‘frailty’ a lot. In the clinical environment, across academic literature, in the media to describe weakened politicians and even from my 3-year-old son (courtesy of the snail).

As clinicians, we are aware of the complex interplay between physical, psychological and social aspects of illness and health. And yet when the pressure of work is intense we sometimes neglect our own wellbeing.

As we come up to a year since COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization and ‘normal’ life as we knew it was halted, BGS President Dr Jennifer Burns reflects on what has happened over the past year.

Lucy Lewis, Chair of the Council, opened the conference’s online lunchtime session with a welcome to all. This is the second year the NAHP Council committee has brought together the wider Council membership at the BGS Autumn Meeting 2020 to meet the Committee representing them and to provide an opportunity to listen and engage and to hear what is important to them.

In the collaborative spirit of multidisciplinary rehabilitation, we crowdsourced the design of a new textbook!

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought lots of changes, and we have come to accept many of these as our new normal. The BGS had to cancel the Spring Meeting 2020 as face-to-face meetings were understandably not possible due to the pandemic. 

I took early retirement from my post as a consultant stroke physician at the end of 2017 but have continued to work in undergraduate medical education on a part-time basis. I am based in the Education Centre of the Trust where I have worked since 1997, so my return to clinical duties at the height of the pandemic was a temporary redeployment.

This year’s BGS Rising Star Award for Research has been jointly awarded to Dr Richard Dodds and Dr Atul Anand. Richard is an Honorary Consultant Geriatrician at Newcastle Hospitals and an Intermediate Clinical Fellow at the NIHR Newcastle Biomedical Research Centre.

The Fragility Fracture Network has just published the second edition entitled Orthogeriatrics- The Management of Older Patients with Fragility Fractures.