GERIATRIC ASSESSMENT
David L. Chesler, M. D.

Preventive Medicine and Health Maintenance is a prime focus of your providers at Charlottesville Family Medicine. For many people, this focus is on promoting healthy lifestyles, updating immunizations, cancer screenings as well as screening for other important problems such as diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. The purpose of all of this revolves around helping our patients to maintain healthy, comfortable and productive lives. For older individuals, this process becomes much more complicated, and your providers at Charlottesville Family Medicine have introduced new tools fashioned specifically for them.

Clearly, our goal and objective as we care for older individuals is in promoting health and comfort and, also, specifically helping them to maintain their independence in their own homes and communities. Even without any influence of various diseases, AGING itself can produce changes within our bodies which can make living independently more challenging. By utilizing a battery of simple assessment tools, we are able to review our patients' capacities to perform functional tasks which are necessary to meet the demands of daily living independently within their home environment. Where problems are identified, we can help direct interventions which can improve key areas of function and thereby promoting the older individuals' independence and ability to remain and function at home. We call this geriatric assessment a "Review of Functions" and will greatly enhance our ability to care for our elder patients as we work to promote their over all health and well-being.

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