Consultant Geriatrician

Job overview

These are substantive appointments for colleagues to work alongside the seventeen existing geriatricians based at Musgrove Park Hospital, Somerset NHS Foundation Trust. Whatever your subspecialty interest, we would like to hear from you – with good evidence for new developments in all aspects of geriatric medicine, it’s likely that we can develop a role that plays to your strengths as well as meeting your needs.

Main duties of the job

To organise, manage and be responsible for the diagnosis and treatment of patients in Musgrove Park Hospital in conjunction with Dr James Gagg, Associate Medical Director (Medicine).

Except in emergencies, or where otherwise agreed with your manager, you are responsible for fulfilling the duties and responsibilities and undertaking the Programmed Activities set out in your Job Plan, as reviewed from time to time.

You will be required to participate in an on-call rota to provide emergency cover and to provide enhanced medical / geriatric medicine support to the hospital. When not on an on-call rota, we may in exceptional circumstances ask you to return to site for emergencies if we are able to contact you. You are not, however, required to be available for such eventualities. Where emergency recalls of this kind become frequent, we will review the need to introduce an on-call rota.

You are responsible for the associated duties set out in the Terms and Conditions of Service.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

We welcome highly skilled motivated geriatricians to join our existing friendly team of geriatricians.

You will  deliver full range of specialist diagnosis, treatment and care to patients requiring geriatric (and, for those with GIM accreditation, acute) medical services, both as in- and outpatients, as outlined in the proposed programme

The Care of Older People (COOP) services provided by Musgrove Park Hospital are organised from excellent facilities within the acute Trust and cover the following key strands of work:

• Acute frailty services delivered via our front door frailty team (Older Persons Advice and Liaison practitioners in ED, and the Acute Frailty Unit), together with the Acute Medical Unit, Same Day Emergency Care, and four further geriatric medicine wards. The 19-bed unit AFU aims for a max 72-hour length of stay and provides comprehensive geriatric assessment for selected patients admitted mainly directly from ED using a cohesive MDT that includes our OPAL (older person’s advice and liaison) practitioners based in ED, a dedicated social worker and the JETT -Joint Emergency Therapy Team. All COOP wards have dedicated therapy, discharge liaison and social worker support.
• The hospital has two further wards currently badged as ‘general medicine’, but we are aware that most patients on these wards are in fact frail older people who need specialist geriatric MDT care, and our expansion plan will see one or more of these wards brought into the COOP fold, alongside improvement in subspecialties in line with the interests of successful applicants.

• Movement disorders and Parkinson’s disease team
• Orthogeriatric, osteoporosis and fracture liaison services
• A dedicated Delirium and Dementia team working across wards and with CMHT
• Surgical liaison team (one consultant, 2 nurse practitioners) seeing emergency pre- and post-operative patients for optimisation and treatment decisions. A new service is offering review for selected high-risk elective patients.
• Oncogeriatric service providing comprehensive geriatric assessment to selected older people with cancer
• Heart Failure liaison, providing one heart failure clinic per week and contributing to the heart failure MDT alongside cardiology teams. Our colleague with an interest in heart failure retires in December so we’d particularly welcome any applicant with cardiology interest.
• Frailty Hospital at Home
• Outpatient services including Rapid Access Clinics and subspecialty clinics
• Audit, Research - the hospital benefits from an active research department and our department contributes to several trials, with colleagues holding PI roles. If you have an academic background, please talk to us about adding a research element to your job plan.
• Quality Improvement – we have a highly supportive improvement team, with whom the department has worked on major projects such as front door frailty and our dementia and delirium projects. Gold QI training is encouraged.

Please see job description for full details.