JMP Students partner with Piedmont, CA community for senior health

Partnerships Pair Medical and Nursing Students with Resident Volunteers

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Medical and nursing students are learning about and caring for older adults in their entirety — body and mind — through unique partnerships at Piedmont Gardens in Oakland, Calif.

Nursing students from Samuel Merritt University work one-on-one with Piedmont Gardens residents as part of their nursing studies. The program started with just two students and has grown to a dozen today. At the same time, students from the University of California, Berkeley/University of California, San Francisco Joint Medical Program do physical exams and take residents’ medical histories.

Eleven-year Piedmont Gardens resident Sid Spies, a retired internist from Southern California, is preceptor to the medical students, a role he describes as part supervisor, part mentor. Students are paired with resident volunteers for three years, long enough for them to really get to know them.

“This is the last time in their lives they will have three hours to take a history,” Spies says, adding that when he was a harried young medical student he and his classmates often viewed their older patients as time-wasters — a persistent belief he hopes programs like Piedmont Gardens’ will help dispel.

“Empathy is such an important part of practicing medicine. It’s very different from treating a heart attack,” he says.

Second-year medical student Asa Tapley agrees. “This program allows students to apply their learning, to actually practice physical exams and history taking. You don’t practice medicine in a lecture hall.” Spies says the experience is especially helpful to new doctors who will probably spend a third of their time treating elders as baby boomers age. He says the situation will be further exacerbated by a general shortage of family practitioners.

Community Services Director Elizabeth Chamish, who oversees programming for Piedmont Gardens’ 300 residents, says that the dozen or so resident volunteers in the medical student partnership are valuable resources for the medical students, many of whom live far from their grandparents and can’t spend intensive one-on-one time with elders.

“Here the students get a reality check,” she says. “There are real people here.”

An emerging component of the partnership with the group is planting cool weather vegetables as fall sets in, and making plans for the future. “We should probably grow some herbs and thyme,” Lee says. She would also like to get worms for their compost bin, and she dreams of establishing beehives as well.

Sister Marilyn Medau, program director at St. Mary’s, says that last year the center served about 300 homeless seniors and about 600 seniors who have homes but need resources to help them age in place. The center also helps young children and families, but the mid-day hot meal they serve on Thursdays is just for seniors.

“We use the food they bring in for salads or as a vegetable medley,” she says of the Grand Lake Gardens donations. “I’m very grateful for any kind of healthy food we can serve to the seniors, and fresh produce is high on that list.”

UC Berkeley and UCSF Medical School pairs 16 medical students with 16 resident volunteers. Led by doctors Claudia Landau and Guy Micco of the joint medical program, the project focuses on the less clinical, more social and psychological aspects of elder care. Chamish says Piedmont Gardens has again proved to be a rich environment for volunteers.

“We needed 16 and got 50,” she says, holding up a single-spaced two-column sign-up sheet of volunteers, adding that every one of the 20 selected showed up for the orientation. “Our residents have the drive to help the next generation, an instinct to pass along their wisdom. They’re saying ‘I want to be a part of this.’”

Executive Director Gayle Reynolds says the partnerships between Piedmont Gardens and the nursing and medical schools greatly benefit the larger community.

“It encourages those entering these professions to focus on older adults at the same time it engages the residents,” she says.

Walking through the busy Piedmont Gardens lobby, greeting many residents by name, Chamish says that seniors are demanding both a stronger voice in their care and a more personal, less institutional environment. She sees the partnership as an incremental step toward that cultural change.

“I like to think that everyone who comes here will retain this powerful experience and use it in the future,” she says.