Geriatric Medicine

The Department of Geriatric Medicine was established in 1988. It is a comprehensive department integrating the diagnosis and treatment of geriatric diseases with health care for cadres. It has inpatient and outpatient sections, with 3 wards and a total of 138 beds. It currently has 20 specialist physicians from multiple disciplines, including cardiovascular medicine, neurology, respiratory medicine, endocrinology, gastroenterology, traditional Chinese internal medicine, and others; among them are 8 chief physicians, 4 associate chief physicians, and 18 physicians with doctoral or master’s degrees. There are 48 nursing staff, including 1 chief nurse and 5 associate chief nurses; among them are 4 geriatric specialist nurses and 3 traditional Chinese medicine specialist nurses. The department has successively undergone development as a key discipline at the provincial and municipal levels and is a Hangzhou municipal clinical key specialty in geriatric diseases (respiratory direction). It is a teaching base for Zhejiang University, Zhejiang Chinese Medical University, and others. It is currently a national base for standardized training of traditional Chinese medicine resident physicians in the general-practice specialty. The department has strong technical capabilities and a high level of clinical, research, and teaching competence.

The department leverages the strengths of its multidisciplinary personnel and personnel specializing in integrated Chinese and Western medicine. In response to the characteristic of older adults having “multiple coexisting diseases,” it has established the development direction of “a large comprehensive department with small specialties” and is making every effort to build a diagnostic and treatment system that is “both comprehensive and specialized” and features multidisciplinary collaboration. It provides chronic disease management for older adults, comprehensive geriatric assessment, and intervention treatment. It provides various forms of treatment using traditional Chinese medicine and Chinese medicines. It has strengthened the management of geriatric critical illnesses and has successfully rescued patients with various critical conditions, including refractory heart failure, malignant arrhythmias, acute coronary syndrome, cerebrovascular accidents, severe systemic infections, and multiple organ failure. It operates a specialized outpatient clinic for geriatric diseases and also outpatient clinics for geriatric cognitive impairment, geriatric cardiovascular diseases, geriatric respiratory diseases, geriatric nutrition, geriatric frailty, and traditional Chinese medicine sleep care, as well as other geriatric medicine subspecialty outpatient clinics. It conducts rapid sarcopenia assessment, cognitive function screening, nutritional assessment and therapeutic intervention, as well as guidance on the rational use of medicines by older adults and exercise rehabilitation treatment.