Helen Kao watched three of her grandparents suffer from dementia so perhaps it’s no surprise she chose to go into geriatrics. What’s more surprising is the way the 37-year-old physician at UCSF Medical Centeris now transforming the way elderly and dying patients are cared for in San Francisco.
“When I start a relationship with a patient and their family, that is it: I am committing myself to be there and work with them until they die,” she said, an attitude that is reflected in what she has accomplished.
Last year, Kao started the UCSF Geriatric Transitions, Consultation, and Consultative Care Clinic, or GeriTRACC, creating what she calls a “continuity of care” between in-patient teams, out-patient home care teams and hospice agencies to provide elderly individuals with smoother, better quality care.
Helen Kao makes the home care of patients seamless,” said UCSF Home Health clinical manager Barbara Maury, because “she speaks to the patients and their families in such a way that they understand the complexity of their illness, and it empowers them to make decisions.”
After receiving degrees in English and East Asian studies, Kao took a writing job at the Harvard AIDS Institute and soon after entered medical school. It wasn’t until the intern year of her residency that she discovered she wanted to do geriatrics.
“At the time I was really struggling,” she recalled. “I loved internal medicine, the patients, the intellectual part, but I felt something was hugely lacking in the way we were caring for the older adults. We were fixing their pneumonia or their congestive heart failure, but they were leaving the hospital and they couldn’t walk. I kept feeling there has to be something different.”
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So after completing her fellowship and residency at UCSF, Kao worked at the Over 60 Health Center in Berkeley and “it was there that I truly learned how to take care of patients: I saw them at hospital, at homes, as they transitioned to hospice,” she said.
Kao has received honors including Teacher of the Year at UCSF’s Division of Geriatrics in 2010, and Excellence in Teaching at UCSF’s Academy of Educators.
“I hope the clinical programs we’re developing will have an impact and will be something that other places can adopt,” she said.
In January of 2012, a partnership Kao developed between UCSF and the Institute on Aging will see the opening of a new interdisciplinary practice – combining the expertise of geriatric physicians with community-based social services – that Kao hopes will further transform the geriatric primary care system.
“We all recognize that our patients will die. We understand that there’s life and there’s death and part of our goal is not to fight what will necessarily happen,” she said, but “to focus on how can we make someone’s life from the time that we meet them until they die the best possible, and to help them and their family be as ready as possible.”