HHS awards $130 million to boost health professions workforce

Georgia to receive over $2.6 million in grants

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today announced $130.8 million in grants to strengthen and expand the health professions workforce. Six areas are targeted: primary care workforce training, oral health workforce training, equipment to enhance training across the health professions, loan repayments for health professionals, health careers opportunity programs for disadvantaged students, and patient navigator outreach and chronic disease prevention in health disparity populations. The grants include $88.7 million in funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

"An adequate health care workforce is the linchpin for reforming our health care system to ensure greater access, improve the quality of health care and cut overall costs in the long term," said Secretary Sebelius. "Today's awards not only will provide more training opportunities for people interested in a health professions career, but also will support equipment purchases and faculty development to expand and enhance the quality of training."

"With an aging and increasingly diverse population, we need to prepare our health professionals to meet the challenges of providing health care in the twenty-first century," noted Mary K. Wakefield, Ph.D., R.N., administrator of HHS' Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), which oversees the programs. "This includes ensuring diversity in the workforce, and that well-trained professionals practice in areas of severe need."

Expanding the Primary Care Workforce

Training Programs in Primary Care - $42.1 million ($31.5 million Recovery Act)
Grants will support family medicine, general internal medicine, and general pediatrics programs, including curriculum development, faculty development, didactic and community-based education, and training in underserved areas for primary care residents, pre-doctoral students, interdisciplinary and inter-professional graduate students, and physician assistant students.

Oral Health - $23.9 million ($6.7 million Recovery Act)
Funding will target workforce development programs for pre- and post-doctoral training for dental residents; dental faculty; loan repayment for faculty who teach primary care dentistry; and training for practicing dentists, or other approved dental trainees in general, pediatric, and public health dentistry and dental hygiene programs. Funding also includes $4.3 million to states to provide 9 new grantees the opportunity to address their states' unique oral health workforce needs in underserved urban and rural areas. Grants are designed to strengthen the delivery of multidisciplinary comprehensive oral health care, integral to quality primary care.

Equipment for State-of-the-Art Learning

Equipment to Enhance Training for Health Professionals - $50.5 million (Recovery Act)
Funding from the Recovery Act will provide 208 awards to assist with purchasing equipment for training current and future health professionals across disciplines at the undergraduate, graduate, and post- graduate education levels. Awardees include academic health centers, area health education centers, centers of excellence, and other educational institutions that serve underserved and uninsured patient populations, rural communities, and minorities. Equipment purchases will expand current training capabilities by replacing outdated equipment and technology or purchasing equipment that previously was unaffordable.

Types of equipment to be purchased include e-learning tools such as video, audio and interactive learning systems that provide more distance learning opportunities; human patient simulators that give students the opportunity to improve clinical judgment and critical thinking; and mobile dental vans that provide training in delivering care to diverse segments of the population while bringing basic routine dental treatments to families unable to access care. It is estimated that more than 200,000 individuals will be trained, including health professions students, faculty and clinical practice providers.

Priming the Workforce Pipeline

Loan Repayment ($8.3 million) - 29 grants will be made to states that provide matching funds to assist health professionals in repaying their educational loans. In return, these individuals agree to provide full-time primary health services in federal health professional shortage areas for a minimum of two years. Health professionals eligible to receive funding include physicians, dentists, nurse practitioners, nurse midwives, physician assistants, psychologists, and social workers.

Health Careers Opportunity Program ($2.1 million) - Three grantees will receive funding to increase diversity in the health professions by developing an educational pipeline to enhance the academic performance of economically and educationally disadvantaged students, and prepare them for careers in the health professions. Eligible applicants included schools of medicine, public health, dentistry, pharmacy, allied health, and graduate programs in behavioral or mental health.

Patient Navigator ($3.8 million) - Funding will support 10 grants for patient navigator outreach and chronic disease prevention programs to develop and operate patient navigator services that improve health care outcomes for individuals with cancer or other chronic diseases, with specific emphasis on health disparity populations. Grant recipients recruit, train, and employ patient navigators with direct knowledge of the communities they serve to coordinate care for patients with chronic illnesses. Eligible applicants include federally qualified health centers, health facilities operated through Indian Health Service contracts, hospitals, rural health clinics, and academic health centers.

-----
Community News You Can Use
www.fayettefrontpage.com
Fayette Front Page
www.georgiafrontpage.com
Georgia Front Page
Follow us on Twitter:  @GAFrontPage

Secretary Sebelius Releases $33 Million in ARRA Funds to Train Health Professionals

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today announced awards totaling $33 million to expand the training of health care professionals. The funds are part of the $500 million allotted to HHS' Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to address workforce shortages under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

"President Obama is committed to passing health insurance reform and we're closer to reform than ever before," said Secretary Sebelius. "The Recovery Act will help ensure we grow our health care workforce and give our aspiring doctors, nurses and health professionals the tools and training they need to provide top-quality care to more Americans."

"As we mark 200 days since President Obama signed ARRA, HRSA has moved quickly to distribute most of the $2.5 billion assigned to us," said HRSA Administrator Mary Wakefield, Ph.D., R.N. "These funds are helping us rebuild the infrastructure needed to produce more skilled health professionals, and they are expanding essential primary care services to hundreds of thousands of additional Americans through our health center system."

The grants announced today, with funding totals, are distributed through six HRSA programs:

* Scholarships for Disadvantaged Students, $19.3 million. This
program funds health professions schools and training programs which, in
turn, provide scholarships to full-time health professions students,
with priority given to those with financial need.

* Centers of Excellence, $4.9 million. This program funds health
professions schools to establish or expand programs for minority
individuals. Funds may be used to improve student academic performance,
recruit and retain minority faculty, and expand opportunities to train
at off-campus, community-based health care sites.

* Public Health Traineeships, $3 million. This program funds
schools of public health to support traineeships that pay tuition, fees,
and stipends for students in biostatistics, epidemiology, environmental
health, toxicology, nutrition, or maternal and child health.

* Nursing Workforce Diversity, $2.6 million. This program
increases nursing education opportunities for individuals from
disadvantaged backgrounds through student scholarships or stipends,
pre-entry preparation, and retention activities.

* Health Careers Opportunities, $2.5 million. This program funds
schools and health professions training sites to establish or expand
programs that help individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds enter and
graduate from a health professions program.

* Dental Public Health Residency Training, $810,925. This program
funds residency programs in dental public health, including financial
aid to residents.

Today's grants follow an Aug. 12 announcement by HHS Deputy Secretary Bill Corr of $13.4 million in ARRA funds for loan repayments to nurses who agree to practice in facilities with critical shortages and for schools of nursing to provide loans to students who will become nurse
faculty.

To date, HHS has announced the availability of nearly $200 million in ARRA workforce funds, of a total $300 million, to expand HRSA's National Health Service Corps. The funds will pay for student loan repayments for primary care medical dental and mental health clinicians who wish to practice, for a minimum of two years, in NHSC sites that treat underserved and uninsured people.

In addition, HRSA received $2 billion through ARRA to expand health care services to low-income and uninsured individuals through its health center program. To date, more than $1.3 billion of these funds have been awarded to community-based organizations across the country. HRSA-supported health centers treated 17 million patients in 2008, 40 percent of whom have no health insurance.

-----
www.fayettefrontpage.com
Fayette Front Page
www.georgiafrontpage.com
Georgia Front Page