Volume 4, Issue 1
September 26, 2007
In This Issue
- Hartford Trustees Award New Grants (September 2007)
- Hurricane Summit Report Outlines Ten Key Recommendations
- Hartford CGNEs Develop National Nursing Home Collaborative to Address Quality of Care for Frail Older Adults
- Multi-Center Research Teams Receive Beeson Collaborative Grants
- Hartford Grantee Publishes Research on Older Adult Sexuality
- JPN Publishes Findings of National Survey of Geriatric Images on BSN Web Sites
- Communications Tip: Hartford Launches Bandwidthonline.org...Just in Time Help for Grantees
1. The trustees of the JAHF recently approved the following grants:
Hartford Doctoral Fellows in Geriatric Social Work Program Renewal
The Foundation awarded a renewal grant to the Gerontological Society of America to recruit and prepare up to 99 talented doctoral students for academic careers in geriatric social work, with awards of up to $50,000 per student to complete their dissertation research and a pre-dissertation component in conjunction with the American Geriatrics Society's annual meeting. For more information, please visit: www.geron.org/Hartford/docfellows.htm.
Gerontological Society of America, Washington, DC
James Lubben, DSW, MPH, and Linda Harootyan, MSW
Grant amount: $5,000,000 over five years
Centers of Geriatric Nursing Excellence
The Foundation funded four new Centers of Geriatric Nursing Excellence to prepare over 500 nursing faculty members with expertise in geriatrics. The CGNEs will develop innovative programs to recruit and retain new geriatric nursing faculty, and to retrain existing faculty in geriatric nursing. During the next five years, the four new Centers will prepare 178 new doctoral and master’s trained geriatric nursing educators to teach nursing students. At least 340 existing nursing faculty will receive geriatrics training to help them better educate their students in the care of older adults. Three of the centers will create regional consortia to expand their geographic reach and train nurses serving elderly populations most in need. The following four institutions received grants to develop Centers of Geriatric Nursing Excellence:
Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ
Colleen Keller, PhD
Grant amount: $1,000,000 over five years
Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
Ann Kolanowski, PhD, RN
Grant amount: $1,000,000 over five years
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
Jean F. Wyman, PhD
Grant amount: $1,000,000 over five years
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT
Ginette A. Pepper, PhD, RN
Grant amount: $1,000,000 over five years
For more information, please visit: www.geriatricnursing.org.
The John A. Hartford Foundation Geropsychiatric Nursing Collaborative
The Foundation made a grant to support the creation and dissemination of standard competencies and curricula in geropsychiatric nursing to improve the nursing care of older adults and better serve their mental health needs. The project will be led by geropsychiatric nursing leaders from three of the John A. Hartford Foundation Centers of Geriatric Nursing Excellence, with coordination provided by the American Academy of Nursing. For more information, please visit: www.geriatricnursing.org.
American Academy of Nursing, Washington, DC
Patricia A. Ford-Roegner, RN, MSW
Grant amount: $1,200,000 over four years
Development and Dissemination of a Curriculum in Geriatric Cardiology
The Foundation made a grant to increase the geriatrics expertise of cardiologists through the development and dissemination of a geriatrics curriculum for physicians training to specialize in cardiology. This project will be developed through collaboration among the American College of Cardiology, the Society of Geriatric Cardiology, and Duke University medical educators. For more information on the Society of Geriatric Cardiology, please visit: www.sgcard.org . For more information on the American College of Cardiology, please visit www.acc.org.
American College of Cardiology Foundation/Society of Geriatric Cardiology, Washington, DC
Susan Zieman, MD, PhD
Grant amount: $303,524 over two years
Kensington-Hartford Travel Award in Geriatrics
The American Federation for Aging Research received a grant to support travel scholarships for up to 30 doctoral students, fellows, and junior faculty in Georgia to attend major national conferences to support their pursuit of academic careers in geriatric social work, nursing, and medicine. The southeast affiliate of the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR) will administer the program. For more information on AFAR, please visit: www.afar.org.
American Federation for Aging Research, New York, NY
Stephanie Lederman
Grant amount: $73,867 over three years
2. Hurricane Summit Report Outlines Ten Key Recommendations
The 2007 Nursing Home Hurricane Summit, an unprecedented cooperative effort of disaster planning and nursing home leaders from eight Southeastern states hosted by a Hartford grantee, the Florida Health Care Association, has released Caring for Vulnerable Elders During a Disaster: National Findings of the 2007 Nursing Home Summit. The paper provides key recommendations for long-term care facilities and emergency response centers to improve how frail and elderly citizens are cared for during a major disaster.
The primary finding of the report is that nursing homes must be incorporated into disaster response systems at all levels–national, state, and local. During Hurricane Katrina, most nursing homes were not designated by disaster response systems as healthcare facilities, and therefore did not receive early calls to evacuate, and often found contracted transportation commandeered for other uses. To access the full report and key
recommendations, visit: www.fhca.org/news/summitfinal.pdf.
3. Hartford CGNEs Develop National Nursing Home Collaborative to Address Quality of Care for Frail Older Adults
The American Academy of Nursing received funding from the Atlantic Philanthropies to develop the Hartford Centers of Geriatric Nursing Excellence Nursing Home Collaborative. The Collaborative aims to improve the quality of care provided in nursing homes to very frail older adults with complex and unstable health care needs. Cornelia Beck, PhD, RN, a leading expert in nursing home care in the United States, serves as the National Coordinator for the effort. The goal of the Collaborative is to improve care for frail elders and enrich the professional working environment of the nursing home by implementing a research-based professional nursing practice model that can be widely adopted and translated to a national standard. For more information, contact Pamela M. Dudzik, Project Manager at pdudzik@aannet.org or visit: www.geriatricnursing.org/hcgne/nhc.asp.
4. Multi-Center Research Teams Receive Beeson Collaborative Grants
Five research teams have been awarded $400,000 each to collaborate on translational and multi-disciplinary research on aging as the first recipients of the Hartford/AFAR Collaborative Research Awards, an extension of the Paul B. Beeson Career Development Scholars Program. The program seeks to assist teams of geriatrics researchers in pursuing new directions in research on the mechanisms of, and the treatments for, diseases associated with aging.
Systemic Inflammation and Central Nervous System Dysfunction: A Mechanistic and Translational Pilot
Laura Dugan, MD, University of California, San Diego
Jeremy Walston, MD, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
The Cognitive and Physical Rehabilitation of Survivors of Critical Illness: A Randomized Clinical Trial of In-home Rehabilitation
Wes Ely, MD, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
Helen Hoenig, MD, Duke University Medical Center
A Unified Hypothesis on the Protective Potential of Urate in Aging Hearts and Brains
Joshua Hare, MD, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine
Michael Schwarzschild, MD, Harvard Medical School
Peptide Mimetic Therapeutic Agents for Blocking the Apolipoprotein E/Abeta Interaction
Marcin Sadowski, MD, PhD, New York University School of Medicine
David Holtzman, MD, Washington University School of Medicine
Ameliorating Age-related Memory Decline
Scott Small, MD, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons
Frank Longo, MD, PhD, Stanford University Medical Center
o learn more about these grants, visit: www.beeson.org/070724_Beeson_Collaborative_Research_Award_Press_Release.pdf.
5. Hartford Grantee Publishes Research on Older Adult Sexuality
The work of Hartford grantee Stacy Tessler Lindau, MD, MAPP, FACOG, was published in the August 23, 2007, issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. “A Study of Sexuality and Health among Older Adults in the United States” found that many older adults are sexually active, yet while many experience sexual problems few discuss them with their physicians. To read more about this study, go to: www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/80403.php.
Lindau is assistant professor in the Departments of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Medicine (Geriatrics) at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. She was a 2003 Jahnigen Scholar, a 1993 recipient of a John A. Hartford Foundation Student Fellowship in Geriatrics at Mount Sinai Hospital, and the principal investigator of the Hartford Foundation Center of Excellence Grant, “Sexuality, Sexual Health, and the Aging U.S. Population: Pilot Study for the National Health and Social Life in Aging Survey (NHSLAS).”
6. JPN Publishes Findings of National Survey of Geriatric Images on BSN Web Sites
The fact that nurses primarily care for older adults is not reflected on the Web sites of baccalaureate nursing programs, according to a study published in the July-August issue of the Journal of Professional Nursing. The article, “Portrayal of Nursing to Incoming Students: Results of a National Survey of Geriatric and Pediatric Web Images on Baccalaureate Nursing Program Web Sites,” presents the findings of a study funded in part by the John A. Hartford Foundation Institute for Geriatric Nursing. The study found that fewer than four percent of more than 11,000 images reviewed portray older adults. Of sites’ home pages, only eight percent have images of older adults—27 percent portray children and/or babies. This imbalance creates a misperception about today’s nursing care and represents a missed opportunity to stimulate interest in geriatric nursing. To read more, go to:www.professionalnursing.org/article/PIIS8755722307000221/abstract.
7. Communications Tip: Hartford Launches Bandwidthonline.org...Just in Time Help for Grantees
The John A. Hartford Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of www.Bandwidthonline.org, a new, online communications resource exclusively for grantees. This password-protected site is rich with resources to help grantees in many aspects of their communications work—from developing scientific posters and brochures to conducting media interviews to creating dynamic PowerPoint presentations and more.
Bandwidthonline.org is a simple, convenient, and just in time resource that provides one-stop-shopping for current data on the state of our aging society today, quality photographs that lend themselves to the messages of health and aging, stories that are relevant to geriatrics and aging research, and communications tools and tips that are easy to use. Our hope is to enhance grantees’ full range of communications activities.
To make its offerings even more robust, Bandwidthonline.org encourages grantees to share resources that they find or create. So if you have a helpful graph, a beautiful poster, a great photo, or a strong press release, please send it along. And send your ideas about the site, as well. We look forward to hearing from you! Bandwidthonline.org...Just in
Time!
Important Note:You should receive an email from Bandwidthonline.org on Friday, September 28th, with your password. In order to increase the odds that your spam filter will allow the email to reach you, please add the following address to your “safe senders” list in your email program (or ask your IT department to do it for you): jbeilenson@aboutscp.com. If you do not receive a password email on the 28th, please email Chris Gherst at cgherst@aboutscp.com. |
