The future just brightened for meeting seniors' health needs through professionals' collaboration. The federal Bureau of Health Professions has awarded a four-year, $2 million grant to the family and community medicine department at Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, to establish a geriatric education center for eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware.
The center will develop state-of-the-art curricula for health professionals and students, according to a recent news release.
The center will be "particularly dedicated to improving the health care of underserved rural and African-American elders," said FP Christine Arenson, M.D., director of the department's geriatric medicine division. "We will … translate research developed at Jefferson into education programs to be delivered regionally and disseminated nationally."
Jefferson will partner with Marywood University, Scranton, Pa., and Christiana Care Health System in Wilmington, Del., in creating the center.
"Thomas Jefferson University has long been in the forefront of creating interdisciplinary collaboration," said FP Richard Wender, M.D., alumni professor and chair of the university's family and community medicine department, as well as the first primary care physician chosen to be president-elect of the American Cancer Society.
