As the Ocean State’s aging population is expected to skyrocket in the coming years, a University of Rhode Island program providing elder care education is set to expand with the help of a federal grant.
The Rhode Island Geriatric Education Center at URI recently received $5 million from the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, which has been funding the program since it started in 1996.
“We’re really excited,” said Phillip Clark, a professor in URI’s College of Health Sciences and geriatric education center program director. “Most health care professionals have had no geriatric training and we’re hoping to change that.”
RIGEC is one of 45 federal geriatric education centers and is a statewide effort to improve elder care training for health care professionals, students and faculty. The program, which is based in URI’s gerontology program, operates as a consortium with many partners, including URI, Brown University, Rhode Island College, Care New England Health System, PACE Organization of Rhode Island, R.I. Department of Health and the R.I. Office of Healthy Aging.
In 2015, the center received another federal grant to establish the Geriatrics Workforce Enhancement Program. This brings URI’s colleges of health sciences, nursing and pharmacy, as well as Brown and RIC together to create educational programs. These include webinars on RIGEC’s website, as well as seminars at clinics and community health centers.
A videoconferencing-based program known as Project ECHO was also created through these partnerships. Project ECHO is meant to be a community of practice where professionals such as nurses, social workers, pharmacists and primary care providers can help each other and learn from experts on geriatric care, Clark says. Students from URI, RIC and Brown also have the opportunity to participate.
So far, Clark says the program has trained more than 6,000 health care professionals in the last five years and hopes the funding will allow them to train even more over the next five years.
Among the program’s major focuses for the next five years is reaching primary care physicians. While Rhode Island is facing a shortage of primary care providers in general, that also means there’s a greater shortage of those who understand proper geriatric care, Clark says.
RIGEC education focuses on what’s called the “four Ms” of health care for elders: medication, mobility, mentation and matters, or a patient’s personal goals.
It’s especially important for health care professionals to understand elder care because Rhode Island’s aging population is only expected to keep growing, Clark says. On average, 10,000 people in the U.S. turn 65 years old each day. Estimates show next year more than 20% of Rhode Island’s population will be over the age of 65 and the state currently has the fourth-highest percentage of residents over 85 in the country.
Susanne Campbell, senior program administrator with Care Transformation Collaborative Rhode Island, says there have been recent successes through its partnership with RIGEC.
One of these is a six-month quality improvement program that ended in February, which led to five Rhode Island primary care practices getting special designations from the industry nonprofit Institute of Healthcare Improvement for their care of elders. Only two practices in Rhode Island had previously achieved a Level 1 “age-friendly health system” recognition, Campbell says.
With the help of the recent grant, Campbell says there are plans for another quality improvement program in which six more practices in Rhode Island will have the opportunity to qualify for Institute of Healthcare Improvement age-friendly designations.
“If each year we try to do this with five or six practices, that’ll really help Rhode Island have a consistent approach to meeting the needs of older adults,” Campbell said.
Liz Boucher, chief of organizational performance for PACE-RI, says the organization has partnered with RIGEC since PACE opened in 2005. The two organizations have had successful partnerships because they both focus on an interdisciplinary approach to elder care.
PACE also offers a student internship program that Boucher hopes to expand with RIGEC students with the help of the new grant funding.
Not only is Rhode Island’s population aging, there are also more elderly people with Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia. According to Care Transformation Collaborative RI, around 24,000 Rhode Islanders are living with dementia. Campbell says this was a focus of the quality improvement program. Practices in the program were asked to identify patients they had with Alzheimer’s disease and then report which caregiver they had coordinated for those patients and what resources they were providing.
Helping those in underserved communities is another priority for RIGEC. The program plans to do this by educating and training those who work within these communities, specifically community health centers that offer care to patients regardless of age or income, Clark said.