Enhancing geriatric oncology training to care for elders: A clinical initiative with long term follow-up

There is an urgent need to train and foster academic geriatric oncologists (GO) who can participate in a wide number of initiatives designed to confront the increasing burden of an aging population on the health care delivery systems. Over the past decade a new training program to achieve an increase in GOs was established in the United States with the support of the John A. Hartford Foundation and the American Society of Clinical Oncology. In this review we document the scope of the activities, the results and the future of similar programs and the development of successor programs.