History
The Center for Healthy Aging (CHA), a non-profit 501(c)3 corporation, is designed to integrate public, private, and philanthropic resources to help educate and train caregivers, enhance wellness, and provide models of care that demonstrate efficiencies and cost savings while improving the quality of life for elders. Our non-profit will provide easy access to quality of life programs. Our mission is to develop innovative, effective, and efficient programs through research, education, and services designed to improve the quality of life and to promote easy access to these programs.
The CHA team has more than 70 years of experience in health and aging. The Center staff has experience in providing statewide training and education; conducting translational research; designing and conducting program evaluations; assisting local, state and national groups with policy development; providing civic engagement opportunities; and establishing community-based services for elders and their families, as well as those caregivers who serve them.
The CHA staff are adept at grant and contract writing and management; consultation; they also engage with corporate giving officers, foundations and individual donors to help benefactors meet their philanthropic goals.
The CHA staff has developed and evaluated initiatives to effectively and efficiently serve the needs of Nevada’s elders and their families. Our staff has worked with private and public providers, planners, policy leaders, administrators, academic educators, and elders themselves to enhance the quality of life.
The CHA’s work focuses specifically on an elder’s ability to access the most appropriate and affordable health and social services, including services for chronic illnesses. We have extensive experience in providing training for the caregiving workforce across the state, as well as providing program evaluation and preventative and wellness programs for aging services. The CHA staff has provided both civic engagement opportunities and clinical services, such as medication therapy management. The CHA will provide a ‘one-stop shop’ for elder needs that will provide information and referrals to preferred providers that meet our standard of excellence in service to elders and their families.
Over the years, staff have developed programs, provided services, and researched areas that are designed to improve the quality of life for elders and to create a more efficient and effective system of health and social service care.
Examples of previous work have included:
- Helped create advocacy programs, such as SAFE (Special Advocates for Elders), a program active in the various county courts;
- Researched VA pension data nationally, providing the Veterans Administration with valuable information to support a major change in the approach used to inform Veterans about the pensions they are entitled to receive;
- Researched elder medication prescription behaviors and developed a service and education program to decrease interactions, duplications, inappropriate medications prescribed, or contra-effective over-the-counter medications and/or vitamins/minerals;
- Surveyed businesses to measure the impact that eldercare in the workplace has on employees and employers, including the financial cost;
- Consulted with senior living communities to help develop extended services and markets;
- Facilitate developing collaborative relationships and partnerships between organizations to build efficiencies and effectiveness in the delivery of health care to elders;
- Developed the Senior Health Advocate Volunteer program in conjunction with the City of Reno Senior Citizens Advisory Committee and the Washoe County Senior Advisory Board in order to educate and empower elders about community services;
- Partnered with Shared World Tours to experience aging services in other countries, in order to bring best practices back to the United States;
- Developed the Elder Count program and partnered with the Aging & Disability Services Division to publish Nevada Elder Count 2021;
- Developed and operate Elder Gap Services that provide needed services to Reno and Washoe County elders that have no other source of payment for the service.
It is our intent to create similar innovative programs at the CHA that will promote adding life to years.