My colleague Rachael Watman, in her post kicking off this Health AGEnda series on the John A. Hartford Foundation’s new funding portfolios, humorously recalled the Friday history tests she took in eighth grade.
It’s funny, the things we remember from our school days. We all have fond memories of friends and favorite teachers, and, hopefully, things we learned and experiences that helped make us the persons we are today.
But what matters most is being able to link your education—lessons learned through study, experimentation, and experience—to your life and your chosen field in a way that helps others. Or, in the case of the new funding portfolio I now oversee, what we call “Linking Education to Practice.”
This new strategy seeks to identify and fund the best ways to put into practice what we have learned through research over the past three decades. (For information on all five of our new funding areas, please visit the Current Strategies section on our website.)
For 30 years, the Hartford Foundation has focused on building the field of geriatric education; first in medicine, then nursing, and finally social work. It has been my privilege to have inherited the geriatric social work initiative as well as the Centers of Excellence in Geriatric Medicine grants.
I was fortunate to work with dedicated national leaders in academic geriatric education to identify promising leaders to conduct geriatric research, teach the next generation of social work and medical students, and design much-needed curriculum to educate the emerging health care professionals. Over the course of three decades, the Hartford Foundation spent $341.3 million in geriatric academic education.
Now, with our new strategic plan, we are looking for new ways to put the “education” we spent so much time and money cultivating into practice to improve the health of older adults.
The theory of change behind the Education to Practice portfolio is to improve the health care system and its workforce by integrating the fields of education and practice. This portfolio seeks to establish the development of a reciprocal relationship between educational leaders providing knowledge to practitioners and practitioners informing educational leaders of the training required of the workforce who are delivering health care to an older adult population with complex medical and social needs.
With all of the changes happening in health care, this is more important than ever. It is imperative that our educational institutions prepare health care workers for the new models and ways in which they will do their work in the future.
Priority will be given to projects that include interdisciplinary education and practice within two areas for funding. The first area will put into practice the research and body of knowledge created through the medical, nursing, and social work geriatric educational processes. The second area will support educational programs that provide practitioners with additional geriatric knowledge and training in order to enhance their field of practice. Grants to support geriatric continuing education are something we might consider.
An example of the Education to Practice Grant Program is the “Improving the Health of Older Adults Using Integrated Networks for Medical Care and Social Services” grant to Partners in Care Foundation, which provides social services agencies and practitioner staff with the training needed to deliver comprehensive, coordinated, and appropriate care to older people in coordination with medical care. The goal is to improve the health and independence of older adults in need of social supportive services coordinated with medical services.
This new grant program emphasizes the geriatric social work competencies in practice in the community. It also focuses on bringing social work practice into an interdisciplinary partnership with medical practice in the hospital.
All that we have learned regarding interdisciplinary practice in our previous grant programs can now be brought into practice in the community. After all, acing a test in the classroom is a great feeling, no doubt about it. But taking what you learned and applying it in a way that actually improves the lives of others … well, that’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it?
This is the second in a Health AGEnda series on the Hartford Foundation’s new funding portfolios. Read:
What the Heck Are Hartford’s New Funding Areas, Part One: Leadership In Action