UNC's School of Social Work looks to take advantage of a $2.2 million grant from the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration, which it will use to fund dozens of students working in different sectors of the health care industry.
The grant is split into two programs — the Public Health MSW Leadership grant, worth $900,000, and UNC-PrimeCare, worth $1.4 million.
The programs will help providers handle the increasing number of North Carolinians with health insurance. More than 357,584 people in the state have purchased insurance on the health insurance exchange, also known as Affordable Care Act, since fall of 2013.
“I think the best way to define these grants is that they are workforce grants,” said Kathleen Rounds, head of the Leadership program. “To implement the Affordable Care Act, since there are so many parts of it, they really have to train up a workforce so people think differently about how health care is delivered.”
Lisa Zerden, head of the UNC-PrimeCare program, said the act emphasizes integrated care, the coordination of physical and mental health care. The grants will assist social work students who are training in primary care clinics.
Both grants will fund the programs for three years. This year, 31 master's students will be funded under UNC-PrimeCare and five under the Leadership grant. Students will receive a $10,000 stipend that they can use to help pay tuition, health insurance and cover living expenses during their required — and unpaid — field work.
“The students we are funding are in placements three days a week, working full days, so it’s upwards of 700 hours,” Zerden said. “By having the students there so many days of the week, they are going to be giving the physical staff more opportunities to do more integrated activities.”
Zerden and Rounds presented the grant plans to the School of Social Work Alumni Association Saturday. Annanora Short, a 2001 graduate and a social work administrator at a dialysis center in Charlotte, said changes need to be made to integrate social work in health care systems.
“This week I had a meeting with my social workers where all 25 of them said, ‘My administrator doesn’t know what I do,’ which is the same thing I said when I was a social worker,” she said. “Now that I’m meeting with administrators, I can at least say that they are aware now that there is something they need to get. They don’t get it, but at least know there’s something they need to get.”
The grants will also fund seminars open to the public that will educate students about integrated care, the AFA care and its implications on the clinical and systems level. Rounds plans to work with Zerden to develop the seminars.
“What’s nice about having these grants at the same time is that we can work together and really maximize the impact of the grants,” she said. “We can work together in ways that will benefit our students the most.”
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