Professor Christine McKibbin (far left), project director of the Wyoming Geriatric Workforce Education Program, observes a mock testing situation administered by doctoral student Katelynn Bourassa with study participant Duane Cox.
The population of adults age 65 and older continues to grow in the United States. “For Wyoming, our projected growth rate for the older population between now and 2030 places us third in the nation,” says Associate Professor of psychology Christine McKibbin, project director of the Wyoming Geriatric Workforce Education Program at UW. “We’re a frontier state, so that makes challenges apparent in terms of access to medical care, access to specialty care and recruitment of care providers with geriatric expertise. So, we must prepare the existing workforce to meet the needs of our rapidly aging state.”
Enter the new Wyoming Center on Aging. “The center is the umbrella organization for everything we are doing, including resources for health care professionals, for faculty, for students and also for the public,” says McKibbin. “Within that, we received a $2.5 million grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration that will fund us through 2018.
“This funding will allow us to do a lot of exciting things in each of the center’s core service areas. For example, we will be able to provide ongoing training to health care professionals with an emphasis on primary care. The focus for that would be creating geriatric expertise within primary care practices throughout the state and also creating the environment where we can train students—our pipeline of health care professionals.
“We also have an Alzheimer’s On-the-Road program, where we have an expert team that goes to rural communities to provide training to current health professionals,” McKibbin says.
“An exciting component of what we’re able to do now is to actually reach out and provide services directly to older adults and family caregivers in the state,” she says of the grant.
“We are excited that we can partner with health and community organizations to implement chronic disease self-management trainings throughout our state. We also are partnering with First Layer Health to bring innovative technology solutions for care management such as mobile- and television-based, real-time communication to support older residents.”
McKibbin says partnerships with agencies and organizations throughout the state of Wyoming are key to the center’s goals: “I love the partnerships that we’re able to create and how we can leverage our resources and work together with other agencies to do good work. In geriatrics, especially in a state like Wyoming, you don’t want to do this work alone. You find strength in numbers.”
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