complete issue - School of Nursing - University of Pittsburgh

A l u m n i P R O F I L EL i n d a R . P h i l l i p s, P h D, M N ’ 7 3 , B S N ’ 6 9, R N, FA A N, F G S AAlumna committed to improvinghealthcare for Arizona’s elderlyAccording to Phillips, the ideawas to focus strongly ondeveloping geriatric clinicians... and faculty, and to set thecontinuing educational offeringswithin a framework thatwas appealing to those groups.Two-time School of Nursing alumnaLinda R. Phillips, PhD, (MN ’73, BSN’69) RN, FAAN, FGSA, has been calleda pioneer for her work in the care ofvulnerable elders and healthcare deliverysystems for the frail elderly. When shecompleted her doctoral work at theUniversity of Arizona (UA) in 1980, herdissertation led to an eight-year studyfunded through the National Institutesof Health and was among the first studiesof elder abuse in the country.Phillips is a tenured professor ofnursing at UA and serves as codirectorof its Arizona Center on Aging, a Centerof Excellence at UA Colleges of Nursingand Public Health. Since 2002, whenUA’s College of Nursing was awardeda prestigious $1.8 million, five-yeargrant by the U.S. Health Resourcesand Services Administration to establishthe state’s first Geriatric EducationCenter (AzGEC) based at the ArizonaCenter on Aging, Phillips has been itsprincipal investigator.“Establishment of the centermarked a real milestone in Arizona’seffort to promote the health of its olderresidents,” says Phillips, who says shebelieves the statewide multidisciplinaryfocus of AzGEC to address the healthand social issues facing the state’srapidly growing older population helpedUA to receive grant funding. Thisapproach is significant to offering acontinuum of care to aging populations.(Environmental News Network reportsthat Arizona’s population is expectedto increase between 25 percent and40 percent by the year 2025, and morethan one-fifth of the population will beolder than 65.)AzGEC partners include theUA Colleges of Nursing, Medicine,Pharmacy, and Public Health; UACollege of Agriculture and Life Sciences;UA Interdisciplinary Program onGeronotological Studies; the SouthernArizona Veterans Administration HealthCare System; Arizona State University’s(ASU) School of Social Work; andASU’s Interdisciplinary Program onGerontological Studies.Goals of AzGEC include improvingthe training of health professionals inArizona in geriatrics, developing anddisseminating curricula relating to thetreatment and prevention of healthproblems of the elderly, supporting thetraining and retraining of faculty to provideinstruction in geriatrics, and supportingcontinuing education of healthprofessionals who provide geriatric carein Arizona.According to Phillips, the idea wasto focus strongly on developing geriatricclinicians (health professions students)and faculty, and to set the continuingeducational offerings within a frameworkthat was appealing to those groups.Many of the traditional continuingmedical education/continuing educationactivities have been retained, as well as34 u n i v e r s i t y o f p i t t s b u r g h