Calls to expand palliative care education have been explicit since the 1990s, but palliative care training in surgery remains too narrowly focused on end of life.

Good health care for elders requires acute ethical attention to the role of ageism as a pervasive source of bias.

For dying patients and their loved ones to make informed decisions, physicians must share adequate information about prognoses, prospective benefits and harms of specific interventions, and costs.

Geriatric psychiatry offers stable career prospects and opportunities to express humanitarian impulses by working closely with elders.

Dr Steven Starks joins Ethics Talk to discuss the shortage of geriatric psychiatrists and how cross-specialty training can prepare clinicians of all specialties to care for geriatric patients.

Dr Rajesh R. Tampi joins Ethics Talk to discuss his article, coauthored with Drs Aarti Gupta and Iqbal Ahmed: “Why Does the US Overly Rely on International Medical Graduates in Its Geriatric Psychiatric Workforce?”

Dr Helen Stanton Chapple joins Ethics Talk to talk about teaching health professions students and trainees about acknowledging and realizing dying in a healthy way.

Many patients in settings where residents operate can only afford to seek care in a public hospital. The hospital, faculty, and resident surgeon must find ways to minimize the risk to those patients.

This process of developing EBM-based guidelines and applying them to clinical care highlights the tension between generating unbiased knowledge based on statistical aggregation and the application of this information to individual patients.

To succeed in accountable care organizations, physicians will need to learn to emphasize collaboration rather than authority, keep costs in mind, and encourage patients to plan in advance for palliative care and death.