R. Sean Morrison, MD, at the Wiener Family Palliative Care Unit at The Mount Sinai Hospital, which recently earned recertification by The Joint Commission.
R. Sean Morrison, MD, has been appointed Ellen and Howard C. Katz Chair of the Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Morrison, who joined Mount Sinai in 1995, has focused on one goal throughout his career: Improving quality of life for patients and families.
“Our mission is to ensure that persons living with serious illness, multiple chronic conditions, physical disability, or cognitive impairment live as well and as long as possible,” Dr. Morrison says. “We try to establish what goals are important to our patients and help them to achieve them.”
Dr. Morrison will continue as Director of the Hertzberg Palliative Care Institute and the National Palliative Care Research Center. He succeeds Albert L. Siu, MD, who was chair of the department for 15 years. “My No. 1 objective is to build on the success of my predecessors—Drs. Robert Butler, Christine Cassel, and Albert Siu. They created the first Department of Geriatrics, and then the first integrated Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine in the country, and built it into the nation’s leading academic program focused on the needs of older adults and those with serious illness.”
The Mount Sinai Hospital’s geriatrics program ranked third in the nation in the 2017–2018 U.S. News & World Report “Best Hospitals” Guide. And in February, the palliative care programs at The Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai Beth Israel earned recertification by The Joint Commission. “Mount Sinai was one of the first five hospitals to receive Advanced Certification in Palliative Care in 2011,” Dr. Morrison says. “Since that time, our teams, sites, and number of patients have multiplied considerably. Yet our services continue to offer an unwavering quality of care to seriously ill patients and their families.” He thanked the Mount Sinai Health System’s leadership for their support and thanked every team member for their dedication “to removing unnecessary suffering from the world.”
Dr. Morrison earned his MD at the University of Chicago Pritzker. He completed his residency at New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center and his fellowship training in geriatric medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. In 1995, he helped found Mount Sinai’s palliative care program which started with a team of four: Dr. Morrison, Jane Morris, MS, RN, ACHPN; Judith Ahronheim, MD; and another national leader in palliative care, Diane E. Meier, MD, who is a MacArthur Fellow and the Catherine Gaisman Professor of Medical Ethics, and Professor of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Meier now serves as the Director of Mount Sinai’s Center to Advance Palliative Care, an organization that Dr. Morrison collaborates closely with in disseminating innovative models of palliative care education and practice throughout the United States.
At the time that palliative care started at Mount Sinai, it was a novel team-based specialty focused on providing specialized medical care to relieve the symptoms and stress caused by the serious illness for patients and their families. It is still appropriate at any age and at any stage in a serious illness, and unlike hospice, it can be provided alongside curative and all other appropriate medical treatments. “As a result of the research, educational outreach, and clinical-care models developed at Mount Sinai, palliative care is now available in all major hospitals across the country making it one of the fastest growing specialties in American medicine,” Dr. Morrison says.
This is a crucial time for geriatrics and palliative care. “Those over age 80 are the fastest growing segment of the American population, and older adults living with serious and complex medical illness account for more than 60 percent of all health care spending,” Dr. Morrison says. “As baby boomers continue to age, all health care professionals will need to have the core knowledge and skills of geriatrics and palliative care in order to deliver high value health care.”
His goals for the Department are: to develop new models of high value clinical care to match the needs of an aging population; to create the science and evidence base that supports the care; and to train a work force that is well-prepared to care for older adults and those with serious illness. “This is the Department that created the fields of geriatrics and palliative care,” Dr. Morrison says. “My hope is that we become the Department that is responsible for completely infusing these specialties into the genome of American medicine.”