William Mitchell, MD.  As a new physician early in my residency I was thrilled to be in the hospital and the clinic serving people who were struggling with illness and needed help.  It was exciting to be learning about diseases and how to treat them and wonderful to be in a position to be able to help.  But at the same time I began to realize there were gaps in care for some people, problems I didn’t know how to resolve and those teaching me also failed to manage adequately.  Two major themes emerged: symptoms that weren’t relieved and communication about serious illness that wasn’t handled well.  I saw my patients struggling and suffering unnecessarily and knew that I needed to gain some additional skills.  So, in addition to my oncology training I also completed a fellowship in palliative medicine. Today I practice both medical oncology and palliative care.  I care for patients with cancers of the chest, including lung cancer, mesothelioma and thymomas.  I also see patients in the hospital with the palliative care team.  I have served for nearly ten years as the Director of Palliative Care, leading a team of nurses, social workers, physicians, pharmacists and chaplains whose aim is improve the quality of life for those with serious or life-threatening diseases.  Our team is able to see about five times the number of patients we did a decade ago.  This has been a tough job, but also an honor and I’m proud of the work we have done.  I will soon be stepping down from this leadership role to focus more on my patient care and on research questions that I hope will help us improve the quality of our care. It is all too easy for physicians to focus on the diseases they are treating and lose site of the people who have them.  Of course our patients want us to be experts in managing diseases.  But they also want us to care about and for them as people.  My hope is that my colleagues and I can care for the patient as a whole human being rather than just a body with a disease.  I believe that we can do much to make the awful experience of serious illness a little more tolerable.

We are hiring!

We are seeking a Palliative Care physician or a Geriatrician to join the team. This is an excellent opportunity to serve a medically-diverse patient population, and to assist in growing the UCSD at Home program. Click here for more information.

We have a Scientific Research Associate Position availalbe. It requires the applicant being bilingual (Spanish/English) and having a phlebotomy license. Experience administering cognitive tests is a plus. Click here to apply.

We are happy to welcome the Palliative Care physicians to our group as we become the Division of Geriatrics,  Gerontology, and Palliative Care 

The Doris Howell Palliative Care Teams at UCSDH began in 2005 with a nurse practitioner co-rounding with the Bone Marrow Transplant service. Now they represent three inpatient consultation teams, the Step Family Foundation Inpatient Palliative Care Unit, a Palliative Psychiatry team, and a growing clinic team which all strive to function in an interprofessional, shared-leadership model of providing care. They provide specialized, team-based care focused on the relief of symptoms and stress of serious illness at any stage of disease. The palliative medicine faculty come from a variety of backgrounds and many have additional shared appointments in other divisions and departments, such as nephrology, neurology, and hospital medicine, but we will be their home. They also bring along with them a large, shared physician fellowship program that trains seven palliative medicine fellows each year as well as the only Chaplain training program in the country housed within a palliative care group. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, their clinic has been a top adopter of community telehealth, which they anticipate to be a major area of expansion for them over the coming years.

Researchers at UC San Diego are investigating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the health and productivity of early career scientists. We invite post-doctoral fellows and early career faculty (rank no higher than Assistant Professor or equivalent) to complete an online survey. All responses are confidential. Participants will be entered in a raffle for a $25 gift card. Click here to participate!

Geriatrics Grand Rounds: Join us for our monthly series, with a range of talks from experts in the Geriatrics field. Next session will be on Wednesday, April 7, 2021. To obtain log-in information, please email jathomas@health.ucsd.edu

lmproving Geriatrics Education in the Community: SDSU and UCSD are co-leads on a Geriatrics Workforce Enhancement Program (GWEP) grant to continue the San Diego/Imperial Geriatric Education Center and its important work   educating local communities on Alzheimer's Disease and geriatrics!

Looking for a good read? You might enjoy Dr. Louise Aronson's book titled: “Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life". We were fortunate to host Dr. Aronson on the UCSD campus with a lunch event that brought together over 100 community members!

We are tremendously grateful to the Hollander Trust for their generous donation in support of our geriatrics fellowship program in memory of Dr. Trude Hollander.