The ASU College of Nursing & Healthcare Innovation has been awarded a $1 million, five-year grant from the John A. Hartford Foundation of New York to fund a geriatric nursing center to recruit and retain geriatric nursing educators in the Southwest.

The announcement was made by Bernadette Melnyk, the college’s dean.

Arizona and the nation face a critical shortage of nurses ready and prepared to care for an elderly population estimated to double to 70 million by 2030.

The College of Nursing & Healthcare Innovation also announced matching funds pledged by several local organizations. The Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust pledged $500,000 to support two new geriatric nursing faculty positions, and Sun Health Boswell Memorial Hospital pledged $400,000 for two new graduate fellowships in geriatric nursing.

In addition, the Arizona Health Care Association pledged $5,000 for scholarships, while Evercare pledged $5,000 in initial funding.

The grant establishes the Hartford Center of Geriatric Nursing Excellence (CGNE) at the ASU nursing college and the Southwest Consortium for Geriatric Nursing Education under the direction of Colleen Keller, a professor of nursing. Nelma Shearer, an associate professor of nursing, will serve as co-director. Keller and Shearer have conducted extensive research to maintain good health among older adults.

“Nurses are on the front lines of caring for our parents, grandparents and ourselves as we age and face the diseases and frailty that come with getting older,” says Corinne Rieder, executive director of the John A. Hartford Foundation. “It is critical that we improve and increase the number of nurses trained in geriatric best practices.”

Since 1996, she notes, the trustees of the John A. Hartford Foundation have invested more than $67 million in nursing initiatives to improve the care of older adults.

Colleges of nursing at Pennsylvania State University, the University of Minnesota and the University of Utah received similar grants.

The Hartford Foundation funding is part of a major expansion that brings the total of geriatric centers to nine. The four new centers join the five original centers at the Universities of Arkansas, Iowa, Pennsylvania, the University of California-San Francisco, and the Oregon Health and Science University.

With its growing and aging population, Arizona has a critical need for nurse educators to prepare the next generation of geriatric nurse practitioners. Residents of the state older than 65 comprise 13 percent of the population, and this percentage is projected to increase to 22 percent by 2030. There are only 57 geriatric nurse practitioners out of 2,653 in Arizona, where one of every two deaths occurs before the average U.S. life expectancy.

In her letter of support, Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona says, “Educating more geriatric nursing faculty is critical to the health and well-being of our diverse, elderly Arizonans, whose population over 85 years of age will increase by 102 percent within the next 15 years.”

The ASU CGNE also plans to place special emphasis on health disparities among Arizona’s large Hispanic and Native American populations, Melnyk says. The average ages at death for Native Americans and Hispanics in Arizona are 55 and 57, respectively.

Keller says the objectives of the ASU geriatric nursing center include:

• Educating qualified doctoral and post-doctoral students with a geriatric focus and commitment to academic careers over the five-year project period.
• Increasing the number of ethnically diverse, doctorally prepared geriatric nursing faculty.
• Developing and implementing geriatric nursing-focused doctoral coursework with two graduate interdisciplinary geriatric nursing courses that provide substantive theory-based content.

Seven colleges of nursing have joined ASU to form the Southwest Consortium for Geriatric Nursing Education as a unique contribution to the initiative. Consortium members include the three Arizona state university colleges of nursing – ASU, the University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University – and colleges of nursing in Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and southwestern Texas. The members will provide nationally recognized geriatric faculty to mentor doctoral and post-doctoral students across institutions in the program.

The consortium also will conduct monthly seminars, a visiting scholar series, and consultations on grant applications for the on-site component of the primarily Web-based program.