Home » News & Events » Programs Pair Older-Adult Mentors With Medical Students
by Bridget Balch for AAMC
About 1 in 5 people over age 50 report having experienced age discrimination in a health care setting, according to a 2015 study. It’s an issue that researchers at Yale School of Public Health estimate costs the health care system $63 billion a year and can have serious negative effects on the physical and mental health of those discriminated against.
As the proportion of the population over age 65 is increasing rapidly, some medical schools have developed senior mentoring programs that pair medical students with older-adult mentors to help overcome stereotyping and ageism, and to give older adults opportunities to engage with and give back to their communities.
During a gap year she took between graduating from Cornell University and starting medical school at VCU, Sarah Levy volunteered with an organization teaching indoor rock climbing to people with Parkinson’s disease, many of whom were over age 60.
“That shifted my perspective,” she says. “I’m seeing people who might struggle to walk, or to tie their shoes, but they’re fine on 60-foot walls.”
It’s one of the reasons she was excited to take part in VCU’s mentorship program, Senior Mentoring.
Levy’s mentor, with whom she’s met once so far, had plenty of notes on how doctors can better care for older adults, collected from her own experiences with the medical system.
The number one tip: Take time to listen to your patients.
“It’s great because she’s got good advice,” Levy says. “I want more of those tidbits from her.”
VCU’s program is one of several similar initiatives that Micayla Flores, MD, a second-year internal medicine resident at Massachusetts General Hospital, included in a review published in the August 2025 issue of Academic Medicine.
Flores and her coauthors identified and examined the structures and impact of mentorship programs on students and mentors at 19 medical schools across the country.
“I wanted to understand what existed previously to develop relationships with older adults outside the hospital,” Flores says. In the hospital, “we’re seeing older adults in a very different way than we do in everyday life.”
“Students in medical school tend to only see frail elders in the hospital setting,” says Leland “Bert” Waters, PhD, director of the Virginia Geriatric Education Center, who led the mentoring program for years. “Yet only a small percentage — less than 5% — are frail enough for long-term care.”
When VCU’s Virginia Geriatric Education Center started in 1987, one of the goals was to help students recognize the diverse experiences of aging and to build more empathy for older-adult patients.
Flores found that the 19 medical schools that had published research on their mentorship programs had positive outcomes. But her review also revealed that only nine of those programs were ongoing as of 2024, when she performed the review. Several had been discontinued due to lack of funding or trouble recruiting and retaining mentors.
VCU’s Senior Mentoring program, one of the longest running of such initiatives in the country, is required for all first-year students.
They receive education on geriatrics and ageism and then meet in pairs with an older-adult mentor at least three times during the academic year.
In the past 15 years, the program has built a robust core group of older-adult mentors by recruiting through community organizations.
“Once you get a good volunteer, they tend to stay for five to 10 years or more,” Waters says.
Bren Goodman, for example, has been volunteering as a mentor for about five years and has enjoyed getting to know a wide range of students.
“Each relationship has just been fabulous, and each student pairing is different,” Goodman says.
She was inclined toward participating in this program, in part, because of her own career working for the state to develop housing for older adults. She was also the caregiver for eight of her older relatives, including grandparents, parents, and four aunts, at different times in her life.
Now, as a retiree at 72, she volunteers in hospice care and hopes to encourage her medical-student mentees to be intentional about not allowing the age of their older-adult patients to negatively affect how, as future doctors, they interact with these patients as individuals.
>>Read full article
