In 2023, the Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in collaboration with the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC), received a Brookdale Foundation grant to fully scale its LEAP Fellowship (Learn, Explore, Advocate, and Promote) program to provide geriatrics and palliative medicine leadership training to fellows and early career professionals across the country.
The Brookdale Department, also established by the Brookdale Foundation, has the largest and most comprehensive geriatrics and palliative care training program in the United States and has trained one in five such specialists nationwide.
The grant allows the Department to expand its successful LEAP Into Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Leadership Fellowship, launched in 2021, to train doctors to assume leadership positions and promote changes in health care that better meet the needs of the aging population. The two-year program provides clinicians with the vision, skills, and expertise necessary to LEAP into positions as future health system leaders, hospital executives, and change agents devoted to integrating geriatric and palliative medicine across all areas of practice.
For nearly 60 years, the Brookdale Foundation has advanced the field of geriatrics in New York City, across the country, and around the world. The Foundation endowed the Department at Mount Sinai—the first of its kind in the United States—and created a national leadership program.
“The Brookdale Foundation has consistently been on the cutting edge of funding new and innovative programs around aging,” says R. Sean Morrison, MD, Ellen and Howard C. Katz Chair of the Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine. “Scaling the LEAP fellowship is yet another example of Stephen Schwartz’s visionary leadership and the Foundation’s commitment to the field.” Stephen Schwartz is the President of the Foundation.
The LEAP curriculum will be disseminated through CAPC, a national organization within the Brookdale Department, which is dedicated to increasing the availability of quality, equitable health care for people living with serious illness. Since its founding in 1999, CAPC has trained more than 100,000 clinicians through its award-winning, interactive mobile platform. Utilizing this successful model, CAPC will collaborate with Mount Sinai faculty to offer its LEAP fellowship program online.
Through LEAP, physicians learn how to succeed in executive-level roles and become trailblazers who will re-engineer national health care to better serve older adults. LEAP also trains leaders to build innovative programs and care strategies that ensure diversity and equity for aging patients, families, and the clinicians who care for them.
Training emphasizes communication and leadership skills, health care policy and delivery knowledge, and programmatic development and management skills. It includes a 10-session course administered through CAPC, where the emphasis is on health care finance and health system business subjects, background that fellows will need in future leadership roles. Typically, within one year of fellowship graduation, 50 percent of Brookdale students attain leadership positions; within six years, 100 percent have a leadership role.
“The LEAP program is designed to develop leaders with the knowledge and skills not only to provide high-quality clinical care for older adults, but also to help develop and lead the systems that will provide that care,” says Dr. Morrison. “It's about ‘leaping,’ to use the acronym, doctors from early level positions into positions of mid- to senior-level leadership very quickly to affect the changes that need to be made in hospitals and health care systems.
“Clinicians from anywhere in America—in rural areas, small towns, or big cities; local hospitals or large health systems—will now have unprecedented access to Brookdale Department experts and the country’s very best geriatric leadership training,” he adds. “This gives trainees in fellowships throughout the United States the opportunity to access our curriculum and our training, so they can do it locally by tapping into a virtual community and a virtual program that spans the country rather than just our own health system. That way, rather than training eight doctors a year, we can train perhaps 350 doctors per year.”
The goal is to reach 50 percent of the nation’s geriatrics and palliative medicine fellowship programs within two years of launching the national LEAP curriculum.
Prior to receiving the grant, Mount Sinai launched a pilot program to share LEAP with a select number of institutions, including Cornell University, Duke University, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, New York University, UCLA, University of California, San Francisco, and Yale University. Participating physicians offered overwhelmingly positive feedback.
Updates about the developing program can be found on the CAPC website.