Consultant in Geriatric Medicine

To provide, in conjunction with consultant colleagues, the Trust’s Geriatric Medicine service. Our Geriatric Medicine team is one of the largest in the Trust and provides inpatient and outpatient care across all our hospitals with consultant-led beds at The Northumbria, Wansbeck, North Tyneside and Wansbeck General Hospitals and our Community Hospitals.
We are committed to developing patient pathways beyond the traditional secondary care inpatient/outpatient model to better meet the needs of frail patients in our communities. This is aligned with the trust strategy to ensuing we provide the best care for our local people, in the right place, whatever the stage of a person’s life.
Our Acute service is based at the Northumbria Specialist Emergency care Hospital (NSECH), with 19 inpatient beds on our dedicated Admissions Ward for patients presenting to ED either directly or via their GP, and a peripatetic Frailty Assessment Service (FAS), which is consultant-led with Nurse Practitioner and therapist support, providing assessment of frail patients in ED itself, with the aim of initiating CGA early in the patient journey and facilitating early direct move to the most appropriate place for ongoing care; whether that be their home or one of our inpatient facilities.
More recently we have opened an Elderly Assessment Unit (EAU) in Wansbeck Hospital with aims to provide same or next day assessment to frail patients in response to acute deterioration.
We manage three major locality hospitals at North Tyneside, Wansbeck and Hexham, plus a number of smaller community hospitals and clinics from Tynemouth to Berwick on Tweed, in addition to our state-of-the-art Northumbria Specialist Emergency Care Hospital, the first of its kind in England. We also care for people in their homes and provide services from facilities in local communities such as health centres. We give people greater choice and control over their care to help them to live independently at home and avoid hospital admission where appropriate. High quality patient care is at the heart of everything we do and we strive to ensure every single patient and service user has an exceptional experience with us. We have one of the most extensive patient experience programmes of any trust in England.
This aligns with the trust strategy to develop credible alternatives to emergency department attendance and receives referrals directly from the ambulance service as well as GPs.
Our Frailty Virtual Ward is well established with plans to develop further. Elderly Assessment Unit (EAU), virtual frailty ward and the frailty assessment service in Emergency Department (ED) links with other community initiatives such as 2-hour urgent response.
Our ambition is to open another EAU at North Tyneside Hospital in the future to help further build the vision of responsive frailty services close to patients. In Hexham we also run a 5/7 Elderly Assessment Service (EAC) which sees new (and some review) patients direct via GP referral for patients in the West of the region.
We have subacute wards at Hexham, Wansbeck, and North Tyneside General Hospitals, providing ongoing care for those felt to still need significant medical input, therapy and discharge planning following initial assessment at NSECH. In addition, our Community Hospital wards provide locally based inpatient rehabilitation and palliative care for those requiring a longer inpatient stay.
We have geriatrician input into intermediate care facilities in the North Tyneside areas at North Tyneside Intermediate Care unit and Princes Court with shared care with local GPs and Community re-ablement and rehabilitation teams.
Our inpatient liaison services provide orthogeriatric input to the Acute Trauma Ward at NSECH. We have an established general surgical liaison service for patients undergoing emergency laparotomy, with plans to further develop a proactive high risk outpatient service. We also hope to develop more generic surgical and medical liaison service to other wards in the Trust.
In terms of Outpatients, we run award winning Falls and PD services across the Trust, general outpatients and are Multidisciplinary Assessment Clinics (MDACs) to provide CGA to frail patients.
We are active within planned community services and have geriatricians working within community teams such as the proactive service in North Tyneside, Nursing Home MDT working in Northumberland, and run a number of Community MDTs.
We host junior doctors of all grades across our service and are funded for training 4 Geriatrics Specialty Trainees. In addition to the opportunity to provide medical clinical and educational supervision and training; there is also the opportunity to be involved in training and supervising other staff groups within the department such as our Nurse practitioners and pharmacists.
We are keen for colleagues to develop variety in their job plans, to reflect personal interest and skills. Rotation through many of the areas above is enc