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UC Davis Health puts its industry-leading geriatric team in a one-stop shop in Sacramento

UC Davis Health ranked as the nation’s 25th-best hospital for geriatric care in this year’s US News & World Report listing. But until now, the academic health system had not established a clinic where a range of specialists in that field could practice together.

On Thursday, UCD Health CEO David Lubarsky and other leaders formally opened a Health Aging Clinic in midtown Sacramento where both patients ages 65 and older and their caregivers will be able to work with a care team.

“Every day, 10,000 Americans turn 65,” Lubarsky said. “By 2060, 25% of the United States will be over the age of 65. In Sacramento County, there are 200,000 residents now over the age of 65, 27,000 over the age of 85. And they’ve needed a clinic like this one, because this is really critical, right?

“Six in 10 U.S. adults have a chronic condition. Over the age of 65, 85% have some chronic disease, and 60% have two or more chronic diseases. We need a clinic that understands people who are getting on in years.”

UC Davis has been doing the work to prepare for this silver tsunami, Lubarsky pointed out: Not only has UCD’s clinical care been recognized as among the best in the nation, but Davis leadership also focused attention on caregivers as the critical linchpin in maintaining the well-being of older adults by establishing the Family Caregiving Institute at the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing.

Moreover, Dr. Charles DeCarli and others have secured millions of dollars to conduct leading research in the field of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, and the UCD Medical Center emergency department recently was recognized as being age-friendly.

It’s the right time to launch a one-stop-shop clinic focused on geriatrics, Lubarsky said, and UCD Health has done just that in a building it leases at 3160 Folsom Blvd.

Terri Harvath, a geriatric nurse for 40 years and the leader of the Family Caregiving Institute, said this day represented a dream come true for her.

“Finally we’re seeing what has for too long been invisible, which is that important role of the family caregiver,” Harvath said. “The Family Caregiving Institute was started in 2017 with a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and launched really thinking that we would be focusing on research and on health professions education. And when this initiative came along, it allowed us to pivot to think about providing clinical services for family caregiving, which, really, I think sets us apart from a lot of geriatrics programs that you see across the country.”

There are an estimated 40 million family caregivers struggling to care for older family members, Harvath said, and those caregivers represent diverse ages, genders and generations.

“A one size fits all model is not going to work,” she said. “We need to tailor our interventions to meet the specific needs of caregivers in different kinds of situations.”

The Health Aging Clinic started with a soft launch in January and has slowly added services over the course of the year, according to a UCD Health statement, and clinicians there have so far welcomed roughly 1,300 new patients.

Dr. Susan Murin, interim dean of UCD’s School of Medicine, said the planning for this clinic spanned a number of medical disciplines and the clinic will bring together numerous professionals — geriatricians, geriatric nurse practitioners, cognitive specialists, pharmacists, and many others all to bear on the care of older patients.

The goal at the clinic is to treat patients in a very holistic way, said Stephen Cavanaugh, dean of the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing, considering not only their physical concerns but also their spiritual, mental and emotional needs as well as the needs of their pets.

“Health care is moving away from the hospital situation into more communities, into the home,” Cavanaugh said, “and we need facilities like this to help individuals and their families adjust to these changes.”