By Ronni Chenoff, PhD, FAND, FASPEN
UAMS Arkansas Geriatric Education Collaborative
The Arkansas Geriatric Education Collaborative (AGEC), a Geriatric Workforce Enhancement Program, is working on goals and objectives for the second year of this program to educate health professionals, students, caregivers, first responders and the general public about issues and topics that affect our older population. We are proud of our achievements during the first year and are coming up to midway through year 02.
We will continue to offer video teleconferences four times/year; the first conference, broadcast in September addressed strategies to prevent and manage falls in both in-patient and outpatient settings. An upcoming video teleconference, scheduled for October 26, will be on trauma in the geriatric patient and anti-coagulant reversal strategies. Previous programs that you may have missed will be available as DVDs or on-line (unedited). Coming programs may be seen at UAMS or a site near where you or work by the interactive television network, but programs are now available through Blackboard Collaborative, a web-streaming option; this means you can stay at your computer and receive the program in real time and ask questions through the chat option. This is always true for some live programming; on November 2, we are sponsoring a Geriatric Grand Rounds to be broadcast live and video streamed. The grand rounds speaker will be Dr. Richard Zraick, professor and chairman of Speech Pathology/Audiology at the University of Central Florida, formerly professor in the College of Health Professions at UAMS and UALR. He will be addressing “Communication Impairment in Persons with Alzheimer’s disease”. We are delighted to offer you the opportunity to access AGEC programming more conveniently.
Opportunities for more education in geriatrics include the Arkansas Geriatric Education Mentors and Scholars (ARGEMS) program, a self-study for health professionals that can be completed on line and the Summer Institute, a program for faculty in the health professions. ARGEMS can be started at the participants’ convenience; more information may be obtained at our website, www.agec.org, for interested readers. Invitations for Summer Institute for Faculty will be sent out after the New Year. If you are interested, read more about it on our website. Both programs are tuition-free.
As we plan ahead, we would love to hear from you about what you would like to know more about. We will be conducting a statewide needs assessment in the spring, 2017 and hope you will take the time to answer the questions on line or using a mailed survey. In the meantime, feel free to e-mail your suggestions for topics and programs to agec@uams.edu or post a note on our website page.
We all wish you a great fall and holiday season and hope to see you soon!