News & Events: Preparing Older Adults for Surgery

The UCSF Center for Surgery in Older Adults is pleased to announce that we have been awarded funding from the UCSF Integrative Oncology Collaborative (IOC) for our pilot project: "PrehabPal: Digitally Enhanced Coaching to Prepare the Mind and Body for Cancer Surgery." The principal investigator on the study is Emily Finlayson MD, MS, Professor of Surgery, Medicine, and Health Policy, and Director of the Center for Surgery in Older Adults. A key component of the project is the web app "PrehabPal". Marrying high tech with high touch coaching from the patient support corps, PrehabPal evaluates [...]

"In modern surgery, it's a rare event to die from surgery," says Dr. Emily Finlayson, director of the University of California San Francisco's Center for Surgery in Older Adults. "The risk comes from being able to recover." ......Fragility, cognition, mobility, depression, how much support how someone has at home — those are all also factors to be considered. These are mostly non-traditional factors, and in particular, "fragility is an emerging concept that goes beyond chronological age. You can be eighty and really fit, or you can be fifty-five and have a lot of physical function issues and [...]

Emily Finlayson, MD, MS, director of the Center for Surgery in Older Adults at UCSF,  was interviewed by Becker's Hospital Review on how hospitals work to prepare at-risk older patients for surgery, screening for frailty and meeting patient's health goals.  Older patients undergo major surgery on a regular basis. However, a number of these patients are at risk for experiencing complications, functional decline and loss of independence after surgery. With this in mind, Emily Finlayson, MD,  professor of surgery and health policy at University of California - San Francisco Medical Center, [...]

Navigating Aging focuses on medical issues and advice associated with aging and end-of-life care, helping America's 45 million seniors and their families navigate the health care system. Surgery can be hard on older adults, resulting in serious complications and death far more often than in younger patients. But many seniors aren't adequately prepared for the risks they might face. Innovative hospitals such as Duke University Medical Center, the University of California-San Francisco Medical Center and Michigan Medicine are working to change that. In the weeks leading up to surgery, they [...]

A research team at the UCSF Center for Surgery in Older Adults (CSOA)  including faculty, research residents, staff and students, gave a poster presentation about the UCSF Surgery Wellness Program entitled, Get Fit for Surgery: An Interdisciplinary Geriatric Surgery Wellness Program, at the 5th Annual Quality and Safety Symposium hosted by the UCSF Department of Medicine on May 28, 2015. The presentation reported on early results on this new clinical intervention, which launched in February 2015 at UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay  The goal of the Quality and Safety Innovation Challenge [...]