Faculty member awarded funding to train and empower VA staff

Dr. Sue Grover, a faculty member with the East Tennessee State University College of Nursing, has been awarded funding from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Rural Health for a project designed to train and empower VA staff to improve care to veterans living in rural areas.

Grover’s grant project speaks to the strong history of rural health care training at ETSU and the collaborative process between the university and the James H. Quillen VA Medical Center at Mountain Home. Throughout 2013, the funding will provide further, focused rural health training events consisting of on-site “Train the Trainer” sessions and online experiential and interactive learning. The funding amount is $689,352 over five years.Grover, along with Daryl Visser, is co-director of the Rural Health Professions Institute, which the VA Office of Rural Health established in 2009 to provide experiential and interactive learning for VA staff.

An interprofessional focus enhances this collaborative effort between ETSU and the James H. Quillen VAMC, from the design of the curriculum to assessment. The College of Nursing’s Center for Nursing Research is administering the grant and will work to provide the training and conduct follow-up interviews with participating VA team leaders who — as a result of the training — develop process improvement projects. The college will then evaluate and propose the best of those projects to the RHPI for inclusion as “best practices” topics to be used in published or conference form.