Daniel Pound Retires After Transforming UCSF Geriatrics Since 1995; Will Return as Recall Faculty in 2026

Soon after I moved to San Francisco in 1995, I found a great apartment and a great job.  I had gotten good grades in engineering school (I liked understanding how things function) and bad grades in medical school (I hated rote memorization), so it felt good to take a job as a teacher at UCSF to learn the things I had missed in medical school. I had not attended a Geriatrics fellowship, instead I landed in Geriatrics at UCSF as a lucky accident.  I applied to work in Family Medicine at the UCSF Lakeshore practice, but Jack Rodnick offered me a job in Geriatrics primary care instead since there were no openings at Lakeshore. Rather than move later to the general Family Medicine practice at Lakeshore, I stayed in Geriatrics at Lakeside (people could never remember which was which) because I liked the stories that older patients told me. Good things happen in primary care if you stay in the same place for several years. I regret to say that my track record has not been that great since I have only managed to keep 1 out of my original panel of 400 patients from 1996 alive until 2025. She will soon celebrate her 104^th birthday. Our practice taught Geriatrics fellows every year from 1997 (when the Geriatrics Division was founded) until now, which made my job easier since many of those fellows became UCSF Geriatrics faculty and expanded the night call group. Over 29 years our practice grew from 1 to  5 primary care doctors, added embedded behavioral health, transitioned from paper charts to an electronic medical record, changed our name from Lakeside Senior Health Center Center (people used to ask if we were a nursing home or a spa) to Lakeside Senior Medical Center (fewer calls for spa appointments) to UCSF Center for Geriatric Care, and moved from a funky building with great parking on Ocean Avenue to the Institute on Aging building on Geary Boulevard that does not leak during rainy weather. We developed a team of providers and staff that set the standard for UCSF primary care in advance care planning and several other clinical and quality issues. I am grateful to have learned from my work colleagues and above all from my patients. As medical director I learned about practice administration, billing and coding, and how to manage people and encourage them to grow in their careers. Because my academic appointment is in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, I always worked one half day every week teaching residents at San Francisco General Family Health Center. That helped keep me on my toes about prenatal and pediatric care, but I quit trying to remember the names of so many birth control pills. I taught 2000 students on home visits. Now many of those students are esteemed UCSF professors themselves. As a student in the graduating class of 2021 said to introduce me when they presented me with a teaching award “Who could ever forget Incontinence Bingo!” New England Journal filmed me for 2 days in 2025 seeing patients and teaching students.  They are editing footage to create a short educational video planned for release in 2026 about teaching Geriatrics and primary care for older adults.  I will be eager to see how I look on video in the Incontinence Bingo hat.  After I retire in January I will travel across Europe from Madrid to Rome and everywhere in between with the goal of speaking 5 foreign languages but no English for 7 weeks. After I return to work seeing my patient panel in March, I hope to develop my educational games into smart phone apps before I reach the age when I could be a patient at Geriatric Care myself. I look forward to taking cello lessons, playing chamber music with friends, learning how to dance tango, visiting family and friends with a more flexible schedule, learning more languages, and making dinner for my partner Joel to repay him for always having dinner ready for me when I got home every night.