Center receives $1.5M grant

MIDDLETOWN » 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, according to a press release. 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. About 66 percent of health centers now 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.