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6 New UC Chairs to Promote Study of Aging
The University of California's five medical centers will each receive a newly endowed chair in geriatric medicine—a subspecialty dedicated to providing medical care for elderly patients. In addition, a chair has been endowed at Berkeley because the campus offers major programs in public health and optometry, as well as a joint medical student educational program with the medical school at UC San Francisco.
This initiative aims to recruit and retain UC faculty clinicians who are skilled in the art and science of caring for the elderly; promote state-of-the art teaching for UC medical students, residents, and other health sciences students by ensuring that the chaired faculty actively teach and mentor; and ensure that the "best practices" in geriatrics education and research are shared through the UC system.
California has the largest elderly population in the nation. An estimated 3.3 million Californians are age 65 and older. This population is expected to reach 5 million by 2010 and to exceed 7 million in 2020. The fastest growth among California's seniors is in the age group 85 years and older. Today, one in 77 Californians is 85 years old or older; this proportion is projected to be one in 62 by 2010.
The six new faculty chairs have $12 million in state and private funds to launch them. A total of $4 million in state funding was provided to UC to fund two chairs named in honor of former California governors Edmund G. "Pat" Brown Sr., and Ronald W. Reagan, and located at UCSF and at UC Irvine, respectively.
The Larry L. Hillblom Foundation, with headquarters in Petaluma, contributed $2 million to fund the newly endowed chair at UC San Diego, and the Archstone Foundation in Long Beach provided $1.5 million for the chair at UCLA's Geffen School of Medicine. Smaller donations from other private sources, and reallocations of existing endowments, provided funding for the other two chairs.
The program originated with legislation, signed by Gov. Gray Davis in 2000, known as the Geriatric Medical Education Training Act of 2000 (formerly Assembly Bill 1820 by Rod Wright). This legislation requested that the UC system develop new initiatives to improve teaching in geriatrics for UC medical students and resident physicians.
The new chairs will be part of the UC Academic Geriatric Resource Program, authorized by the California Legislature in 1984.
— Lavonne Luquis/UCOP