A newly formed statewide advisory board will be asked to provide consultation, ideas and leadership to meet the health education needs of Nebraska.
The Nebraska Area Health Education Center (AHEC) Advisory Board gathered for its organizational meeting March 4 in Grand Island. About 35 people — including physicians, school teachers, hospital officials, state senators and college professors — attended the sessions.
“Our focus needs to be on education, not on delivery of services,” said Mike Sitorius, M.D., director of the Nebraska AHEC and chairman of the UNMC department of family medicine. “If we focus on education, we can make some tremendous accomplishments.”
UNMC received notification last fall that it would receive the three-year, $2.08 million grant from the federal AHEC program. The grant provides funding for the formation of two AHEC centers. The Central Nebraska AHEC is being formed to support a 28-county area around Grand Island. A Northeast Nebraska AHEC will take shape around Norfolk in 2002-2003. If more funding were secured for the following three-year period, more centers would be formed in other parts of the state, Dr. Sitorius said.
Although the centers’ state program office is based at UNMC as part of the Rural Health Education Network, each of the centers will have its own director and board of directors, as well as its own administrative and business structure. Three-quarters of the AHEC funds are required to be spent in the local sites.
“We won’t have sustainable programs if we direct them from the Med Center – that’s not what we’re about,” Dr. Sitorius said. “For these to work, decisions need to be made on a local level to most effectively address health-care education needs that may be unique to those areas.”
The statewide AHEC will complement UNMC’s innovative programs in rural health and will provide infrastructure support to strengthen it. UNMC formalized its commitment to rural Nebraska nearly a decade ago when it formed RHEN, which has begun several programs — including eighth-grade science meets and the highly successful Rural Health Opportunities Program (RHOP) — to address rural health-care shortages.
“AHEC will build on the success of RHEN and will provide for more community decision-making, in terms of their health-care needs and resources,” said Roxanna Jokela, director of RHEN and deputy director of the Statewide AHEC Program Office.
During the March 4 meeting, advisory board members discussed possible priorities of the AHECs in addressing rural Nebraska needs in telehealth, continuing education and career development.
Ultimately, it is hoped that the AHEC centers will have a positive impact on the health of the populations they serve. That will be accomplished by directly educating the public and by “growing their own” health-care providers through introductory health profession seminars, superior distance learning opportunities, and incentives to return to rural Nebraska to practice their health profession.
UNMC was the first to receive an AHEC grant in Nebraska, which is among the last states to receive that type of funding.
“The AHEC funding provides another opportunity for UNMC to improve the health care of rural Nebraskans,” Jokela said. “We’re excited about the opportunities that this funding will bring.”