VCU Receives Federal Funding for Development of Geriatric Education Center

By Malorie Burkett

The Virginia Commonwealth University’s Virginia Center on Aging in the School of Allied Health Professions, has received a $2.2 million grant from the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration for the development of the Virginia Geriatric Education Center Consortium.

A five-year, collaborative response to the concurrent aging of Virginia’s population and the shortage of geriatrically trained health care professionals, the new VGEC aims to improve the training of health professionals in geriatrics.

“This award comes after an intense national competition, so it is confirmation of the strength of our consortium, with VCU as the leading institution,” said Edward Ansello, Ph.D., director of the Virginia Center on Aging and professor in the Department of Gerontology. “This funded project is exactly what Virginia so greatly needs.”

Through a cooperative agreement with the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, the VGEC will conduct a series of needs-based initiatives, including inter-professional faculty development, curriculum development, clinical training of students and continuing professional education.

The VGEC will feature a focus on preventing the recurrence of falls among seniors, using an evidence-based practice approach, or EBP. The approach would include bringing together the various health care professions to learn what works in preventing falls and how each profession can contribute to success, such as improved monitoring of medications or focused health screenings.

According to Ansello, over the course of the past year, consortium members from VCU, the University of Virginia and the Eastern Virginia Medical School regularly have been meeting at the Virginia Center on Aging to assess community needs, identify expertise within the consortium, suggest and obtain partnering agencies in the community and build a proposal to address the shortage of geriatrics expertise in Virginia.

As project director, the Virginia Center on Aging will partner with the Schools of Medicine, Pharmacy, Social Work and Nursing at VCU and at partnering consortium member institutions as they focus collectively on professional student education in geriatrics, faculty development and in-service training of heath care providers.

Ansello also says the project has a central element of university-community engagement through partnerships with community health agencies for training.

“Updating the geriatrics skills of practitioners is only meaningful if older Virginians benefit,” said Ansello. “This is not a knowledge-for-knowledge's sake project but rather an initiative whose ultimate goal is improving the well being of older Virginians, and it’s aimed where most of us live, namely, in our communities.”

For more information, call 828-1525 or visit http://www.vcu.edu/vcoa/.