The Northern New England Geriatric Education Center received a $400,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Aug. 5 to expand programs that will improve and diversify the education of geriatric professionals, according to a DHHS press release. The center — which operates under the Centers for Health and Aging at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and Dartmouth Medical School — received the grant as part of a larger $159.1 million DHHS grant to support health-care workforce training, the release said.
The grant is a five-year commitment, according to Julie DeGalan, the NNEGEC’s program leader. The center will receive approximately $400,000 each year, though the exact amount is dependent on the federal budget and the success of NNEGEC’s programs, she said.
The center will use the funding to train a diverse group of individuals, according to Stephen Bartels, director of the Dartmouth Centers for Health and Aging.
“We will continue to focus on the same programs but will specially emphasize training in rural areas for those who are least fortunate and medically underserved in the Northeast,” Bartels said. “Our program consists of a variety of educational activities not just for doctors, nurses and medical students, but for a diverse group of people from all different backgrounds and professions.”
Bartels said that leaders of the NNEGEC also hope to promote shared decision-making and fundraising with the grant, in addition to developing a volunteer component program that will provide companionship to senior citizens.
“Funding helps keep these important outreach programs going,” he said.
Additionally, the center is developing a research laboratory to examine fall prevention and risk assessment, which is of “extreme importance” since Vermont has the highest rate of falls in the nation, Bartels said.
When the NNEGEC was established in September 2007, it was partially funded by a three-year, $1.24-million grant from the DHHS. The initial grant expired on June 30, at which point the center applied for additional funding, DeGalan said.
The initial grant allowed NNEGEC to provide over 20,000 contact hours and geriatric training to nearly 5,000 health-care professionals and students over the past three years, Bartels said.
The new grant will also enable the NNEGEC to continue to explore new and innovative programs that improve health-care providers’ competency, DeGalan said.
“We were able to do outstanding work with the first grant, and this new funding will further help us achieve our goals of improving communication and treatment of the elderly and of providing evidence-based education and training to health care professionals,” she said.
Bartels said the funding is particularly important in the current health-care environment since the number of “older adults” is dramatically increasing.
“We are terribly unprepared as a health-care system to accommodate their needs,” he said.
After he realized that New Hampshire and Vermont were the only two states that had never received funding for geriatric training programs nearly four years ago, Bartels wrote the initial grant proposal to fund the NNEGEC, DeGalan said.
Compared to surrounding states, New Hampshire and Vermont also contained the fewest individuals who had received formal training in geriatrics, Bartels said.
Bartels said he hopes to use the new funding to further improve the program and extend its scope locally, nationally and internationally.