Update from Mid-Central Regional AHEC
Health Careers Pipeline Program
This past fall, Mid-Central AHEC hosted the 5th annual Health Careers Pipeline Program in partnership with Central Michigan University's College of Medicine. The program included 27 high school participants from 10 Mid-Michigan area high schools and 27 undergraduate health profession student mentors. The program continues to bring awareness and education to students in underserved and underrepresented medical communities by offering hands-on experience during nine weekly sessions that cover a variety of health careers and wellness information.
Program attendees were able to participate in mindful yoga practices, 9-1-1 call demonstrations and essential clinical skill practices. Participants toured an ambulance, neurology lab and simulation labs facilities. There were opportunities to engage with health professions from more than a dozen fields including emergency response units, nutrition, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, athletic training, public health, social work, audiology, speech language pathology, physician assistant, physical therapy and more. Additional program highlights can be viewed in this CM Life article, 9&10 News clip and on the Mid-Central AHEC Facebook page.
This upcoming spring, a trust funded by Huntington Bank, will support an expansion into the Great Lakes Bay Region of Mid-Michigan. The Saginaw Health Careers Pipeline Program will take place this March and April. There will be similar experiences and collaborations along with new partnerships and community engagement lessons intertwined with the health professions career exposure and knowledge throughout this new program offering.
Tribal Opioid Summit June 9-10, 2020: "Healing our Families Together"
The Mid-Central Area Health Education Center is once again serving on the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan planning committee for the 2020 conference titled, The Third Annual State and Regional Tribal Opioid Summit: Healing our Families Together.
While the first two conferences focused on education, information and knowledge building, the third annual conference will identify and feature innovative approaches to community care in both native and non-native populations in Michigan and the Midwest. This year's focus will be family and community engagement. This two-day conference will have keynote speakers, workshop presentations, and facilitated networking opportunities. At the end of the conference, attendees will understand that opioid addiction needs other entry points into treatment and recovery besides court systems and can be handled with other interventions besides criminal offenses. Workshop topics will include, but are not limited to:
- Providing new access points for community and family members to seek treatment
- Increasing focus on pharmacology
- Increasing focus on maternal and child health and addiction during pregnancy
- Increasing knowledge of the correlation to infectious disease (exp: Hepatitis C)
- Implementing grass roots strategies to address intergenerational trauma
- Building Trauma Informed Systems
- Identifying best practice state-of-the-art SAMA Telemedicine methodologies
- Identifying the impact on pharmaceutical component in terms of the cost of addiction
- Establishing new youth intervention strategies for communities
This year's two-day conference will be held at the Soaring Eagle Casino and Resort in Mt. Pleasant, MI. For additional information, please contact April Osburn at april.osburn@cmich.edu or 989-774-7107.
Health Profession Students Gain Interprofessional Experience Through IPE and Health Aging Initiatives
Interprofessional education (IPE) serves to teach physician assistant, speech language pathology, audiology, public health (master's level), nursing, therapeutic recreation, pharmacy, social work, and medical students how to work together to serve future patients. In order to teach students about IPE collaboration the Central Michigan University (CMU) College of Medicine, CMU's Herbert H. & Grace A. Dow College of Health Professions, Mid Michigan College Nursing program, and Ferris State University Pharmacy program teamed up to present a Fall and Spring IPE workshop. The CMU programs also work together on the IPE Healthy Aging Initiative. The fall workshop is the first step in the IPE programming for students where they are separated into groups from each program and given different tasks to communicate and collaborate on in order to learn about one another's career choices and how one day they can work together in the field. In the spring, workshop students are once again separated into groups and given a case study to work through by collaborating with each other to solve it. During these two workshops the AHEC staff helps to facilitate and guide the students through the process. Students are able to broaden their view on the various tasks that each other do and how they can work together in the future. Not only do these program events help with collaboration, but they also help break down barriers and biases.
Another aspect of the IPE programming is the Healthy Aging Home visits. This program has incorporated over 300 students from the above disciplines into the surrounding communities to participate in a fall risk assessment. These students are put into teams of 3-4 and they spend about 1-2 hours with each participant in their house conducting a wellness check-up focused on reducing fall risk. The Healthy Aging Team consists of Dr. Jyotsna Pandey, MD, PhD and Andrea Beatty who administer and coordinate these efforts. The AHEC staff along with CMED & Health Professions staff volunteer their time to join these student groups on their home visits to be a staff facilitator. Through this effort we have been able to learn more about our community and offer various health related support to ensure that community members have health and safety measures available to them.
