Healthcare professional training: a comparison of geriatric competencies

Health professionals specializing in geriatrics are a unique but scarce resource who nevertheless play a critical role in shaping the care of older adults. An interdisciplinary didactic and clinical training milieu would have the potential to maximize training opportunities for geriatric healthcare professionals. The fact that little is known about the concordance between discipline-specific geriatric competencies hampers the creation of interdisciplinary geriatric training opportunities. Discipline-specific geriatric experts compared the geriatric competencies specified by geriatric-certifying bodies of five healthcare professions: dentistry, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and social work. Overlap and differences in geriatric competencies across disciplines are presented, and opportunities and barriers to interdisciplinary geriatric education are discussed.