UT Southwestern is providing new hope for older adults who suffer fractures and the complications that can result from those injuries with the new Returning Seniors to Orthopedic Excellence (RESTORE) Program .
Led by Dr. Megan Sorich, who had special fellowship training in orthopedic geriatric trauma, RESTORE is the only program in North Texas focusing on the musculoskeletal health of older people and consolidates clinical efforts across UTSW Departments including Geriatric Medicine, Internal Medicine, Emergency Medicine, Anesthesiology and Pain Management, Clinical Nutrition, and Physical Therapy.
Read more about UT Southwestern's RESTORE Program
geriatrics is near and dear to my heart. I had a very good relationship with my grandmother and I just decided when I was going through medical school that I wanted to help take care of people's grandparents. I think I really got interested in geriatrics during my residency. Just seeing so many hip fractures and hearing the patient's story and seeing how this one fracture is truly a sentinel event in their life. And I feel like it's really us as not only surgeons but just physicians to really take better care of these patients restore means returning seniors to orthopedic excellence. Essentially it's a program that helps optimize patients that are undergoing surgery for their hip to help them have optimal recovery. We have at this time 10 million people above age 50 industrial process and we know that the number of the hip fracture annually in us exists 340,000. The thing that I am most excited about this program is that it's so unique. We are the first of this kind of program in north Texas and there's only about 22 nationwide and really worldwide that are certified from our international geriatric fracture society. It takes a lot of effort from all of the departments to really come together with a unique vision. I am the nurse manager. So my role is to oversee the care that the patient receives while they're in the hospital. It does take a village to care for one patient that includes physicians, nurses, dietary social work, physical therapy, pharmacy as an orthopedic surgeon. This is really my passion is to really take better care of these older adults with musculoskeletal injuries and especially fractures. So I will be guiding the patient experience fixing the fractures and really leading by co management and being a champion on the orthopedic side for these patients. Our goal here is in collaboration with DR Suresh is that after the patient received the treatment that Clemens hospital, we obtain enough information so we can diagnose what underlying problem is. And we offered the prospective treatment uh in the future to this population. My role in it is to work with our orthopedics colleagues and our internal medicine colleagues to help them to address those unique needs of geriatric patients as a physical therapist. I'm part of the therapy team which also includes an occupational therapist and sometimes even a speech therapist. We help you return to those activities of daily living and gross motor mobility skills that you need to function such as walking or getting into and out of bed bathing and dressing yourself during these times when you're gonna have pain or maybe you'll have a different way of completing things. We're here to help you through that process and get you back to functioning as optimally as possible. UT Southwestern supports and really inspires innovation and I think that this program is one example of those innovations and one way that we can help to improve the health care of our community here in Dallas you were in the very best hands. We will walk you through the entire process and make sure that you get the most excellent compassionate care possible here at UT Southwestern. We're all in it to really improve patient outcomes for the best interests of the patients. Yeah.
