The Unity Council, Merritt College and Community Employee Partners' Program address growing elderly healthcare needs ---
On Friday, May 13, Merritt College hosted the graduation ceremony for the Healthcare Sector Career Initiative's (HSCI) newest program - the Chronic Care Assistant (CCA) training. More than a dozen students from diverse ethnic backgrounds celebrated their completion of the six-month intensive program. The one-of-a-kind educational program is designed to prepare employer-referred multicultural medical students to seize the new job opportunities brought about by demographic changes: specifically to meet the medical needs of the growing chronically ill and aging, multi-ethnic, limited-English speaking populations.
"Elderly and chronically ill patients require higher levels of care than health care facilities are able to provide, a phenomenon that will only worsen as the senior population grows," said Gilda Gonzales, CEO of the Unity Council. "At the same time, the country is experiencing a shortage of nurses. Chronic care assistants, serving as health coaches, fulfill the role needed to address these major healthcare challenges.”
According to HSCI, the newly created role of multicultural health coaches could help alleviate financial healthcare challenges and while providing a new career path with a promotion and pay raise for medical assistants. The employer-referred graduates are selected based on merit and receive the training for free.
Manuella Stephney, 49, has been a medical assistant at UC Berkeley Tang Center since 2005. “I am so grateful to have had this opportunity because it has allowed me to learn about the mechanism of the body and how to keep it running as healthy as humanly possible,” says Stephney. “It also makes me more marketable in my field."
Recruited and specifically trained, the graduates will provide medication management and appointment follow-up assistance, alleviating patient confusion, especially difficult for those with limited English capacity. This will dramatically reduce the risk of drug interactions, premature institutionalization and complications from not completing treatments among seniors and the chronically ill.
"I believe that if this program is rolled out to all facilities it will definitely be an asset; it frees up the clinician from dealing with things that can be handled by the assisting staff, allowing the clinician to handle situations and problems that are beyond the assistant's scope of practice.
The HSCI was initiated in 2004, by the Unity Council, Merritt College and four community health clinic employer partners: La Clinica de la Raza, Native American Health Center, Tiburcio Vasquez Health Center, and Asian Health Services. The partnership has grown with recently added partners Lifelong Medical Center, University of California at Berkeley, University Health Services/Tang Center (UHS) and Contra Costa College.