MDNews - Cleveland-Akron-Canton

NEOMED Receives AmeriCorps Grant to Further Regional Health Education and Service N ORTHEAST OHIO MEDICAL University (NEOMED) was recently awarded state AmeriCorps grant funding from ServeOhio to support 20 new, full-time positions to create a focused group of volunteers devoted to advancing the health and success of rural Ohio communities, beginning in August. The three-year grant through ServeOhio, the state's governor-appointed commission on service and volunteerism, will total $798,000. A portion of the ServeOhio investment will be matched by NEOMED. Additionally, $330,000 in scholarship money will be made available to AmeriCorps workers to pay back educational debt or advance their aspirations in a health-related career. NEOMED-based AmeriCorps members will develop and deliver a program that addresses healthcare workforce needs in communities, including rural primary care tracks, following the model of NEOMED's Health Professions Affinity Community (HPAC) initiative. Numerous HPACs are being implemented under NEOMED's leadership as part of its larger community engagement initiative to support and guide high school students with an interest in pursuing a health professions career, empowering them to develop sustainable programs that make a difference in the health of their communities. The 20 AmeriCorps members will implement an HPAC service learning curriculum that helps students to identify pressing health concerns in their community through self-directed learning, seek and obtain resources from within their community, and combine resources and learning to formulate health improvement programs while advancing toward healthcare careers. The HPAC curriculum will be offered through local high schools and higher education institutions in identified regions throughout northeast Ohio. This project will become a lead initiative of the Ohio Alliance, which is a state-based consortium organization of the national Sullivan Alliance to Transform America's Health Professions. Based out of NEOMED, the Ohio Alliance coordinates the efforts of multiple partners across the state to advance the health and economic vitality of Ohio through health professions training pathways. I Akron General Reduces Cesarean Birth Rates C currently the most common surgical procedure in the United States and accounts for almost one in three births. In December of 2012, the National Institutes of Health, the Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine, and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists held a national conference to examine this issue. That meeting concluded that "first cesareans" — that is, cesarean delivery in mothers who had never undergone a cesarean delivery — were the leading factor causing the increase in cesarean delivery rates. The conference issued recommendations for induction of labor and performing cesarean delivery during labor. The Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Akron General adopted the guidelines effective Jan. 1, 2013. The results have been dramatic. To date, there has been 8 ESAREAN DELIVERY IS | Cleveland/Akron/Canton MD NEWS I MDNEWS.COM I SEPTEMBER- OCTOBER 2013 a 25 percent decline in the primary cesarean delivery rate at Akron General. Since cesarean delivery is related to increased neonatal morbidity and substantially high maternal complication rates in future pregnancies, this is a substantially better health outcome for mothers and their babies. It also markedly decreases healthcare costs preventing the need to use the operating room and decreasing the length of the women's postpartum hospital stay by approximately a day. "These recommendations point to the need for providing women more education regarding the benefits of a normal labor course and the implications of first-cesarean delivery," says Justin P. Lavin, Jr., MD, Chairman of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Akron General Health System. "This is also a wake-up call to providers to avoid practices that have the potential to lead to unnecessary first-cesarean deliveries." I

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