Let’s face it: In addition to strategic planning, convening, evaluating, networking, and grantmaking, a good portion of my job is just plain bragging. I like to do it. I’m good at it (N.B., bragging about bragging is a rare skill). And our Hartford grantees make it easy.

My job is even easier when a grantee does it on behalf of another grantee. Such is the case with the Hartford Geriatric Nursing Initiative’s evaluation team headed by Dr. Shoshanna Sofaer and the group at Baruch College. They recently produced an Evaluation Brief on our impressive Geriatric Nursing Education Consortium (GNEC) at the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

The main goal of GNEC was to increase gero content in senior-level undergraduate nursing courses by educating faculty in a train-the-trainer method to make curricular revisions at their home institutions. By doing so, many more nurse faculty will have the skills, tools, and competence to educate future generations of nurses to care for older adults.

As you can see in the Evaluation Brief, as a result of the GNEC project, 808 faculty from 418 institutions (69% of nursing programs at the time) attended one of the six two-day Faculty Development Institutes. Furthermore, of the 344 institutions who responded to our evaluation after two years, 81.7% revised and enhanced 676 existing senior-level nursing courses with the evidence-based GNEC materials. Bottom line: Thousands of nursing students in nearly half of the nursing schools in the U.S. will be exposed to gero content and in turn, will graduate better prepared to care for our aging society.

And while we like to brag, we also value the importance of transparency and honest feedback about implementing change. Therefore, the GNEC Brief provides some real world information detailing the model, sharing what makes GNEC work, and where to find free GNEC resources. In addition, the brief provides firsthand accounts from Dean Ellen Olshansky of the University of California, Irvine, and faculty from Salisbury University and Lewis-Clark College. Here you can find candid GNEC accounts of both barriers and aids to implementation.

Please check out the GNEC Evaluation Brief and GNEC resources. You might just find some outstanding tools and tips for making sustainable change at your academic institution that will ultimately improve the quality of care delivered to older adults.

Thanks in advance. I look forward to bragging about you.