Mentoring researchers to improve care for older adults and families

Dr. Rashmi Sharma, associate professor (General Internal Medicine) has been awarded a five-year K24 Midcareer Investigator Award in Patient-Oriented Research from the National Institute on Aging for the project titled “Serious Illness, Serious Challenges: Mentoring Researchers to Improve Care for Older Adults and Families.”

Effective goals-of-care communication is essential to ensuring high-quality, goal-concordant care for older adults with serious illness and their families, yet such discussions remain infrequent, delayed, and of variable quality. Addressing these gaps is especially critical for older adults with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD), who, in the context of progressive cognitive decline, are often excluded from shared decision making and risk receiving burdensome, goal-discordant care.

Although interventions exist to improve goals-of-care communication, few have been tailored to the specific challenges of ADRD, and none have been designed to address language-discordant encounters, leaving a critical gap in strategies to support goal-concordant care.

The K24 will enable her to expand her research and mentoring program focused on improving outcomes for older adults with serious illness, particularly those at higher risk for suboptimal care due to language and communication barriers.