The Jewish Healthcare Foundation staff began the new year with an ambitious vision and a wish for a healthier, safer America. The exercise was to imagine what we could achieve in 2022 by leveraging our collective skills and assets and viable partnerships to address emerging needs and longstanding challenges. The following represent that wish list:
Patient Safety:
- National Patient Safety Board legislation will be introduced and passed in the U.S. House and Senate.
- Our region will achieve global recognition with the Pittsburgh Center for Healthcare Safety Technology.
Better Care Options for Seniors and People Who are Disabled:
- Health professionals are better equipped to serve seniors. JHF will host not one, but two, of its popular Death & Dying Fellowships: one in the winter for graduate students and one later in 2022 for professionals in the field.
- A new statewide Quality Improvement Learning Network will bring best practices to all 600 nursing facilities in Pennsylvania.
- The Revisiting the Teaching Nursing Home Initiative, in partnership with national, statewide, and regional partners and funders, will demonstrate a new model for senior care and will carry that message to a nation.
- Squirrel Hill will be the home of a new state-of-the-art Senior Village. AgeWell Pittsburgh will be strengthened, expanded, and resourced.
Maternal and Child Health:
- The new Statewide WIC Advisory Group will launch, and WIC referrals/services will be embedded in the Pennsylvania Perinatal Quality Collaborative birth hospitals.
- Pennsylvania will finalize doula certification and reimbursement and the legislature will pass the PA Midwifery Modernization Bill, creating stronger and more robust perinatal care teams.
Teen Mental Health:
- Statewide policy change will guarantee reimbursement of community-based teen mental health supports, to respond to the acute access shortage of trained therapists, emergency room capacity, and in-patient options as well as challenges of financial coverage for preventive services.
HIV/AIDS:
- JHF will expand HIV testing by 50% across the region.
- A new sister city collaboration with Montreal, Canada will result in bi-lateral workshops to build capacity across HIV service providers.