Friday, April 4, 2025
4/4/2025
Community Project Funding/Congressionally Directed Spending - Construction - Saint Joseph’s College, 278 Whites Bridge Road, Standish, ME 04084 Elizabeth C. Schran, Interim V.P. for Institutional Advancement 207-650-0143 eschran@sjcme.edu www.sjcme.edu Requested: $1,165,633 The “Collaboration and Community Training Floor” will complete the Center for Nursing Innovation, which also includes a SIM Hospital and Home Health Floor supported by a 2022 CDS request. The intent of this project is to prepare new healthcare workers of all kinds to serve people in Maine, the country’s most rural state and one of the two states—Maine and Florida--with the largest elderly populations. Saint Joseph’s will graduate new nurses and new NP’s in a state with a critical shortage of both nurses and rural physicians and making NP’s the frontline of care, especially for the elderly living in rural areas. We will also train new healthcare workers primarily focused on care for homebound elderly, also an area of critical need. The new floor is comprised of two wings, the Collaboration Floor—which will serve 250 BSN students and on occasion 200 NP students through new advising/test prep/test-taking offices, a telehealth training room, and informal meeting areas for nursing faculty and students; and the Community Training Hub, a 7,100 sq. ft. wing—the area to be specifically funded by the 2023 CDS grant—dedicated to providing the spaces supporting consistent, competency-based training not only for nursing majors and NP students, but for new students from the surrounding community who will engage in workforce training to become new healthcare workers focusing on home health, EMT training and CNA certification, as well as medical assisting for primary care offices. The Community Training Hub will offer three large Smart classrooms, a Smart interactive learning space, a conference room, a resource area, and a locker area also offering 2 laptop stations. The resulting new training floor and the Smart technology that it will provide will enable faculty and instructors to tape classes and demonstrations, students to re-play them, or remote students from anywhere in this large rural state of Maine to participate in real-time remote learning. Faculty and other instructors can also create, manage, and distribute learning materials before, during, and after sessions, as well as schedule videos to start/stop at predetermined times. The Community Training Hub will serve 250 nursing undergraduates, 13 nursing faculty, and (on occasion) 200 NP graduate students, as well as 50 community students per year (and this number is expected to grow once competency-based programs are fully developed). It is predicted that by 2040 the percentage of older adults in Maine will reach 30%, compared to 20% nationwide. More than two-thirds of Maine’s elders live in apartments or their own homes. According to the Maine Census, 30% of Maine’s elders live alone, 71% are females, and 10% live in poverty. Homebound elders who are isolated and lonely sometimes wait 11/2 years for a paid home professional to visit and care for them. For lack of workforce, 6,000 to 10,000 hours of home care goes unused in Maine each week. Older people who would prefer to remain at home find themselves in a nursing home bed at a cost of $90,000 per year. Adding trained home care workers reduces the burdens on family caregivers, allowing them to remain employed, while putting new home care workers on the path to more education and career mobility. In addition to serving the educational needs of BSN and NP students to stem Maine’s nursing shortage, the new Community Training Hub will enable Saint Joseph’s and partners in the aging space (Catholic Charities, Avesta, Maine Council on Aging) to offer competency-based training live and remotely to potential new workers including high school students, college nursing and non-nursing majors, retired individuals, and family caregivers.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).