Our New Map of Life Fellow Apoorva Rangan highlights the concerning gap in geriatric education among graduating Stanford medical students. Despite the growing need for specialized care for older adults, a survey revealed that students missed half of the minimum competencies set by the American Geriatric Society. Apoorva underscores the significant correlation between students' knowledge and their attitudes toward elderly patients, emphasizing the urgent need for reforms in medical curricula. Together with her mentor, Dr. Deborah Kado, Apoorva advocates for interventions to combat ageism in healthcare and to ensure that future clinicians are better equipped to meet the unique needs of an aging population. They call for more comprehensive and standardized geriatric education across medical schools to bridge the knowledge gap and improve patient-centered care for older adults.
Apoorva Rangan, from Los Altos, California, is pursuing an MD at Stanford School of Medicine. She graduated from Harvard College with a bachelor’s degree in Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology and Philosophy. Apoorva aspires to a career working with researchers, community organizations, and marginalized older patients to improve quality and equity in geriatric care. She was a program assistant at UCSF’s AMEND, contributing to a medical-legal partnership that petitioned for the early release or re-sentencing of older incarcerated adults. She has lived and worked in an intergenerational nursing home in the Netherlands and has conducted research on aging, disability, geriatrics, and single-payer healthcare at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, University College London, and the Free University of Amsterdam. She received a Frederick Sheldon Travel Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship.
We designed The New Map of Life to guide us
from the world we inhabit now to a world in
which future centenarians will thrive.
To plot new options for the life course and its
many variables, we created a postdoctoral training
program and appointed an interdisciplinary team
of talented fellows, each paired with a faculty
mentor with expertise in different domains that
are core to longevity.
We challenged the fellows to question the
conventions and assumptions that are so baked
into our age-defined culture, we may not even
recognize them—or the ways in which they have
limited our vision. We find powerful evidence that
longevity holds even greater opportunities
for growth than we thought possible when we
launched our initiative. And we believe that the
very real and substantial challenges that longevity
creates for our economic and social order can be
met—but only if we take action.
https://longevity.stanford.edu/the-new-map-of-life-initiative/