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Polish MIDDLETOWN, Conn., June 12, 2017: Community Health Center, Inc., one of the nation’s leading community health centers, has received a three-year, $1.5 million grant from the Health Resources Services Administration to help health centers around the country train healthcare professionals.
With the grant, CHC will help health centers:
- Establish postgraduate training programs for nurse practitioners, postdoctoral clinical psychologists, and psychiatric nurse practitioners, doubling the number of health centers with residency programs.
- Train health center representatives who want to begin or advance training programs for health profession students. Currently, about 66 percent of health centers train students.
- Develop or enhance teaching agreements with academic institutions to improve their training programs.
- Implement practice transformation measures to help healthcare team members practice at the highest level and improve the functioning of the team as a whole.
The training and technical assistance will be provided through a series of webinars and learning collaborative sessions using live and recorded telehealth technology.
“This grant will allow us to continue to help health centers address the near- and long-term shortage of healthcare providers by establishing their own post-graduate training programs and by advancing the use of team-based care,” says Margaret Flinter, senior vice president and clinical director of CHC, who is co-principal investigator on the grant with Kerry Bamrick, senior program administrator for the Weitzman Institute. CHC established the nation’s first nurse practitioner residency training program a decade ago. It is also certified by federal accrediting agencies as a patient-centered medical home using the team-based model of care.
For the past two years, CHC has been providing health centers with training and technical assistance on clinical workforce development with an earlier HRSA grant. More than 1,800 representatives from health centers and other organizations in all 50 states participated. More than 130 health center representatives attended learning collaborative sessions designed to help them move from planning to implementation; and three health centers are planning to launch a postgraduate residency program for nurse practitioners in the fall of 2017.
CHC will partner with the Northwest Regional Primary Care Association to identify and recruit health centers that could benefit from the training and technical assistance. It will work with the National Nurse Practitioner Residency and Fellowship Training Consortium to ensure organizations have the expertise they need to implement postgraduate programs. It will also work with national and local Area Health Education Centers to develop or enhance their teaching agreements with academic institutions.
“The demand for this training is high and many health centers are concerned about limited or diminishing resources,” says Anna Rogers, program director for the workforce development project. “Our experience has shown that the distance learning model we developed is effective and economical for the participating health centers and their staff members.”
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About Community Health Center, Inc.—Since 1972, Community Health Center, Inc. has been one of the leading healthcare providers in the state of Connecticut, building a world-class primary healthcare system committed to caring for uninsured and underserved populations. CHC is focused on improving health outcomes for its more than 145,000 patients as well as building healthy communities. Recognized as both a Level 3 Patient-Centered Medical Home by the National Committee for Quality Assurance and a Primary Care Medical Home by The Joint Commission, CHC delivers service in more than 200 locations statewide, offering primary care in medical, dental and behavioral health services. For more information, visit www.chc1.com.