Mass General Brigham Geriatrics for Surgical Clinicians 2025

Mass General Brigham’s Geriatrics for Surgical Clinicians 2025 examines how older adults’ health, function, medications, cognition, and priorities shape surgical care. The May 22–23 program pairs presentations with case-based workshops on delirium, dementia, frailty, preoperative evaluation, caregiver support, and pain management. It also addresses mobility, rehabilitation, deprescribing, serious illness conversations, and transitions of care. The course draws on the Age-Friendly framework while considering the additional complexity of multimorbidity and surgical recovery. It is relevant to surgical, anesthesia, geriatric, and perioperative teams seeking a more coordinated approach to older patients. The supplied lecture and workshop sequence is retained below.

Learning Objectives

After completing the original educational activity, participants should be better able to:

1. Describe and apply the Age-Friendly Health Systems framework — Medication, Mobility, Mentation, and What Matters — while incorporating Multicomplexity into the care of older surgical patients.
2. Perform structured delirium assessments, investigate precipitating factors, recognize underlying etiologies, and develop safe non-pharmacological and, when necessary, pharmacological management strategies.
3. Recognize clinical risk factors for falls, fractures, and functional decline and develop practical approaches to prehabilitation, rehabilitation, and postoperative mobility optimization.
4. Conduct comprehensive medication reconciliation, recognize potentially inappropriate medications using established tools such as the Beers Criteria, and apply appropriate deprescribing principles.
5. Assess patients’ goals, values, treatment preferences, and priorities and integrate these considerations into surgical decision-making.
6. Recognize the relationship between common geriatric syndromes, including frailty and dementia, and adverse postoperative outcomes.
7. Coordinate safe transitions of care and engage patients, caregivers, surrogates, and multidisciplinary healthcare teams before, during, and after surgery.
8. Apply practical approaches to perioperative assessment, anesthesia-related considerations, pain management, and prevention of hospitalization-associated complications in older adults.
9. Identify opportunities to implement evidence-informed geriatric surgical care models that support improved safety, function, and patient-centered outcomes.

Topics

• Keynote: Surgery in Older Adults: An Age-Friendly Approach
• Mentation: Preventing and Addressing Delirium in Surgical Patients
• Case-based Workshop: Delirium and Dementia in Surgical Cases
• What Matters Most: Addressing Goals and Priorities for Surgical Patients
• Frailty in Older Surgical Patients
• Case-based Workshop: Supporting Caregivers and Surrogates Before, During, and After Surgery
• Rehab, Prehab and Falls: Optimizing Mobility Throughout the Surgical Continuum
• Multicomplexity: Considering Transitions of Care and Payment Models for Geriatric Surgery Patients
• Case-based Workshop: Serious Illness Conversations: A Guide for Communication About Goals of Care
• Perioperative Care for the Older Adult (Day 1 & Day 2 General Sessions)
• Introduction to Day 2: Navigating Multicomplexity in Older Surgical Patients
• Peri-operative Evaluation of Geriatric Surgery Patients
• Case-based Workshop: Pre-operative Evaluation and Pre-habilitation
• Medications: Polypharmacy and Deprescribing for Surgical Patients
• Case-based Workshop: Medications: Geriatric Surgical Cases
• Anesthesia and Pain Management in Older Surgical Patients
• Case-based Workshop: Surgical Pain Management for Older Adults
• Panel Discussion
• Course Wrap Up

Faculty

• Zara Cooper, MD, MSc
• Sevdenur Cizginer Konuk, MD, MPH, AGSF
• Deborah Lee, MD
• Sharon Levine, MD, AGSF
• Elizabeth Lilley, MD, MPH
• Ariela Orkaby, MD, MPH
• Tamryn Fowler Gray, PhD, RN, MPH
• Julia Loewenthal, MD
• Nancy Latham, PhD, PT
• Esteban Franco-Garcia, MD, AGSF
• Rachelle Bernacki, MD, MS
• Christy Cauley, MD, MPH
• Laura Frain, MD, MPH
• Andrea Wershof Schwartz, MD, MPH
• Lynne O’Mara, MBA, MPAS, PA-C
• Matthew B. Allen, MD
• Alexander B. Stone, MD
• Amy Bulger, MPH, RN, GERO-BC, CPHQ
• Houman Javedan, MD
• Masaya Higuchi, MD, MPH, CMD, AGSF
• Nicole Genovese, PharmD, BCGP

Program scope: The supplied Topics list describes the original program. Breaks, workshops, discussions, and other agenda entries do not establish that every scheduled activity is included in the recordings.

File scope: This purchase covers the educational files offered by MedicalAmboss. Event attendance, publisher-platform access, accounts, memberships, apps, and publisher-hosted extras are not included.