Ethnogeriatric Considerations: Toward Culturally Sensitive Care

As our older patient population grows more diverse, it will become increasingly important to understand how to best communicate with patients, and their families, about values and expectations. In addition, teams of medical providers come from different backgrounds, so good dialogue within the team is crucial to providing quality care to patients. What should we keep in mind when caring for our older patients, who may be from cultures than our own? Dr. Alan Abrams, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, emphasizes that the skills of ethnogeriatric communication are learnable, teachable and paramount to medicine. Dr. Eric Tangalos hosts.