Friday, May 9, 2025
5/9/2025
Community Health Worker Training Program - This proposed project, titled “Establish an Evidence-Based Training and Certification Program for Community Health Workers and Health Support Workers in Nebraska,” aims to address key health disparities and social determinants of health in Nebraska’s vulnerable populations, specifically African American, Latino, and Native American communities. Recent studies have found that there are substantial disparities in longevity of life, chronic disease prevalence, access to health services, COVID-19 impact, and multiple social determinants of health between White Nebraskans and these minority groups in the state. This project will recruit 240 Community Health Workers (CHWs) and health support workers over three years, or 80 trainees per year, to attend a newly established training program led by the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) that incorporates several evidence-based core competencies to meet the unique needs of these vulnerable populations in Nebraska. Trainees will heavily be recruited from the communities they will serve, including African American, Latino, Native American, and rural communities. A network of large health care organizations across Nebraska including the CHI Health, Nebraska Medicine, Methodist Health System, OneWorld Community Health Centers, the UNMC Munroe-Meyer Institute, and the largest pharmacy network in the State, Nebraska Enhanced Services Pharmacies, will help us recruit or refer eligible participants and serve as training sites. Besides extensive and substantive partnerships with healthcare organizations, we have organized an interdisciplinary team consisting of faculty, training site managers, and experienced CHWs to jointly develop and deliver a curriculum that can equip trainees with the skills they need. The training will include modules on Nebraska Health Network’s newly released online program, Community Relay, a database of 140,000 community resources, that will allow CHWs and health support workers to identify the most common patient concerns and determine which local resources are most beneficial in addressing social needs and overall patient impact. Important domains of competencies covered in the training program include financial literacy promotion, emergency preparedness, mental/behavioral health counseling and support, trauma-informed care, social determinants of health, medical ethics, and cultural awareness and culturally informed interventions. There will also be training on COVID-19 related skills including addressing vaccine hesitancy in local communities. Enrolled trainees will undergo 10 weeks of curriculum-based, didactic learning on core competencies, followed by an individualized, experiential training for eight months. At the end of the experiential training, each trainee will be asked to give a poster presentation to highlight their experience and learning during the experiential training and what they have accomplished and learned, before they receive a certificate from the training program. We will establish case management for each trainee since their first day of enrollment to track trainee performance during the initial learning on core competencies, sessions attended, the assigned training site, specific projects/tasks the trainee is working on, and the performance of the trainee based on feedback from the site manager/mentor. We will use these data to inform program planning and refinement over time during the 3-year grant period. Three Demonstration Training Sites will be established each year to showcase the effectiveness and impact of program trainees in improving patient clinical outcomes and reducing healthcare costs through rigorous evaluation. The project team will proactively engage and work with stakeholder organizations across the state for joint efforts in sustaining the newly trained workforce to address health disparities in Nebraska over time. The total amount of requested funding support is: $2,982,600.
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).