Brown Medical School administrators are getting ready to use a $2.6 million grant they won in early September to help create the Area Health Education Center of Rhode Island - a center they hope will benefit state residents who have difficulty accessing health care.
The center, which will be based at the Brown Medical School, will work in partnerships with the state's health institutions and universities to find the best ways to benefit the underserved. Over the next three years, local sites in Providence, Woonsocket and Newport will also be established.
"We're a very broad tent, and the whole idea is that by making the tent very broad you can get a much better sampling of what the needs of the community are and then take the steps to be able to deal with them," said Associate Dean of Medicine Arthur Frazzano, who will serve as the center's director.
The federal Health Resources and Services Administration awarded Brown the three-year grant.
Rhode Island has the most not-for-profit organizations per capita in the country, but their effectiveness is diluted because they often share the same purpose, Frazzano said. Part of the center's goal is to provide the infrastructure and the academic resources these organizations need, he added.
In conjunction with the center, Brown Medical School is in the process of creating a new training program called "doctoring." This new course will require students to spend time in community physicians' offices and become familiar with the barriers to the health care system.
"This is all part of the Brown Medical mission statement, which is to turn out socially responsible physicians," Frazzano said.
Rather than being directly involved in the functions of Rhode Island's community health centers, the Area Health Education Center will facilitate the improvement of health care for the underserved by directly improving the quality of the health care workforce, Frazzano said.
As part of the criteria outlined in the grant, the center will create programs that encourage young people to enter health care professions and to return to their communities for work.
The center will publicize this training program using a grassroots approach, said Kerrie Jones-Clark, executive director of the Rhode Island Health Center Association. Through communication with school nurses and existing school-based health centers, the center will recruit high school students interested in a career in health care.
A career coordinator will also be hired to match high school students to a clinic so that they can learn about the profession through hands-on experience, Jones-Clark said.
The center will be primarily a teaching site.
As one of the ways to improve the health care of the underserved, the center will sponsor continuing education programs for healthcare providers to become bilingual in medical terms, Jones-Clark said. Because often only the children in a family can speak English and translate between doctor and parent, this program will help bridge the barrier of an increasingly multilingual community.
Currently the center is hiring people who will execute the goals specified in the grant. In order to make the program effective, a good social structure and business plan need to be established from the beginning, Frazzano said.
In addition to federal funding, Brown contributed $193,230 in first-year funds to the center. Although the government will finance the center for the next six years, by the third year the program needs to come up with matching funds, Frazzano said.
Brown worked for four years to obtain the federal grant, and the University stepped up efforts in the past two years. Though centers like this one have been in existence since 1972 and all but five states have them, it wasn't until the early 1990s that their success became apparent and the need for one in Rhode Island became more evident, Frazzano said.
Although previous grant applications were denied, that time allowed the committee to develop the program in more detail. After three years, the money was awarded - a speedy delivery in the federal grant world, Clark-Jones said.
