I started my career as a hospitalist in 2011, straight out of internal medicine residency. Within my first few years on the wards, I kept running into the same wall: older patients with complex, layered needs — delirium, frailty, falls, polypharmacy, the patient with altered mental status who keeps getting admitted for a “UTI” that doesn’t quite feel or look like one, and hard goals-of-care conversations. I felt the pull to improve my skills and care for these patients more skillfully and confidently.

It became clear that caring well for older adults is a specialized skill set — one that deserves dedicated, deeper training. So after five years as a hospitalist, I went back and completed a geriatrics fellowship. I then spent four years as teaching faculty in a geriatrics fellowship program, working full-time as a geriatrician — covering inpatient consults across trauma, hospitalist, and orthopedic services, caring for inpatient hospice patients, and rounding in rehab, subacute, and assisted-living settings. The syndromes I was consulted for most were delirium, falls, dementia, polypharmacy, and goals-of-care discussions. I trained internal medicine and family medicine residents, PAs, and medical students, and the feedback from patients, families, and trainees told me I was making a real difference — which is exactly why I loved the work. After thousands of geriatric consults, I kept seeing the same patterns recur, and I realized I could teach them to acute-care providers so they could take their care one step further and tailor it to older adults.

Eventually I came full circle and returned to hospital medicine — this time as a hospitalist-geriatrician, bringing the urgency and efficiency of hospital practice together with the depth and nuance of geriatric care. That combined vantage point shapes everything I do now.

Here’s the conviction it left me with: the older-adult population is growing fast, and there will never be enough geriatricians to care for them all. High-quality geriatric care has to become a shared skill — especially among the hospitalists and frontline clinicians who care for older adults in all care settings every single day. We don’t need everyone to become a geriatrician. We need every clinician who cares for older adults to have a solid geriatric foundation: how to recognize the common syndromes, prevent avoidable harm, and know when to ask for help.

That’s the work I’ve given myself to. Today I practice as a geriatrician-hospitalist in an acute care hospital. Alongside the clinical work, I write, teach, and coach to help clinicians build practical, bedside-ready geriatric skills — the kind that don’t slow down a busy shift, but make the care noticeably better.

I’m Derya Ozkok, MD — a board-certified internal medicine physician and geriatrician with over 15 years of clinical experience. My clinical interests are geriatric assessment, delirium management, and hospital medicine, all aimed at improving outcomes for older adults in acute care.

My first book, Clearing the Fog, distills what I’ve learned about delirium into practical, bedside guidance for hospitalists and acute-care teams — and I’m working on a companion book on practical geriatric assessment for hospitalists.

If this is the work you do, I’d love for you to stick around. For now, the best place to follow along is right here on the blog, where I write about caring for older adults in the hospital. More is on the way — a newsletter, my book Clearing the Fog, and small-group coaching for clinicians who care for older adults — and I’ll share how to join each the moment it’s ready.