Geriatric Psychiatry Fellowship

Geriatric Psychiatry fellows will spend time on three clinical services at Ascension Seton Medical Center Austin: The geriatric consultation-liaison service serves older patients with psychiatric or behavioral problems who are undergoing treatment. The electroconvulsive therapy suite provides ECT to both inpatients and outpatients at Ascension Seton Shoal Creek Psychiatry Hospital. Palliative care service provides fellows with intensive experience with the palliative care consultation team.

Austin State Hospital provides inpatient psychiatric care to a 38-county region in Central Texas. The hospital is accredited by The Joint Commission and certified by Medicare with 299 beds. Geriatric psychiatry fellows will be responsible for the management of geriatric psychiatry inpatients on the inpatient geriatric psychiatry unit at the hospital. Emphasis is placed on complex neurobehavioral problems and treatment-resistant patients.

Dell Seton Medical Center, the primary teaching hospital of Dell Med, is the region’s only Level 1 Trauma Center. Training here emphasizes interprofessional education and providing psychiatric consultation to trauma, subspecialty surgical, neurology, internal medicine and family medicine inpatient services.

Dell Medical School geriatric medicine maintains contracts with a variety of long-term care facilities in Travis County/Central Texas and has established several facilities as training sites. Fellows will round at their assigned nursing home under faculty supervision of a board-certified geriatric medicine physician. Pharmacotherapy and psychosocial/family interventions are the primary modes of treatment.

The UT Health Austin Comprehensive Memory Center serves adults and their families who have concerns about cognitive and/or behavioral and personality changes that may be indicative of neurodegenerative conditions. Diagnostic and treatment services that address both patient and care partner needs include cognitive-communication therapy, counseling and assistance with advanced care planning and connecting with community resources.

The Ascension Medical Group Seton Behavioral Health outpatient clinic serves as one of the primary outpatient training sites for Dell Med’s Psychiatry Residence and as a source of excellent psychiatric care for the community. This clinic will cover a broad spectrum of geriatric psychiatric patients, including patients referred from the inpatient service, intensive outpatient programming and the community.