A second round of federal grant funding to the University of Oklahoma will allow the school to expand its work with rural and tribal nursing home employees caring for residents diagnosed with dementia.
The school will also use the funding to create a worker pipeline for certified nursing assistants that grant leaders hope will entice people to choose jobs in rural and tribal facilities as well as those in underserved areas.
“There’s not a lot of workforce training for CNAs to manage complications with dementia, mobility and medication,” Lee Jennings, MD, a University of Oklahoma Health geriatrician and associate professor of geriatrics in the school’s College of Medicine, told McKnight’s Long-Term Care News on Friday. “It’s an area where we really need to focus workforce development around how best to care for older adults.”
Just 35% of older adults in Oklahoma live in the state’s two urban areas while the rest live miles from specialized geriatric care, the school noted in its press release announcing the grant. By 2025, Oklahoma’s older adult population is expected to exceed 750,000.
The school’s Dementia Care Network started five years ago through an initial grant from the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Health Resources and Services Administration. This second iteration of the same grant funding of $5 million will focus on Native American tribal, rural, and medically underserved areas, which the school said in its press release have significant overlaps.
Over the last five years, the network has trained 1,578 nursing home direct-care workers in dementia-specific care; supported nine nursing homes, which earned Age-Friendly Health System national recognition, and provided dementia-sensitivity training annually to more than 330 health profession students at the University of Oklahoma.
“We see lots of older adults in rural areas in Oklahoma, but we really haven’t thought about how to get the education and training out to those real settings,” Jennings said. “This grant gives us the opportunity to do so.”
The push to create career opportunities for certified nursing assistants comes amid continued national challenges hiring enough CNAs to meet state and federal mandates. The Health Resources and Services Administration recently awarded a $5 million grant to Rory Meyers College of Nursing at New York University for a similar program, as reported earlier by McKnight’s.
At the University of Oklahoma, nursing, medicine, and social work students will train at rural nursing homes and other, qualified health facilities, learning how to care for seniors as an interdisciplinary team rather than siloed health professionals.
The grant money also will be used to create an apprenticeship program for CNAs to obtain their licensed practical nursing degree and then a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. CNAs are required to have 75 hours of training in Oklahoma, and the median hourly pay is just $16 per hour, according to the school’s press release. The University of Oklahoma College of Nursing, Oklahoma’s Career Technology Centers, and the Oklahoma State Department of Health will collaborate on the apprenticeship program as part of an effort to stem high turnover rates in nursing homes.
