The Wisconsin Medical Society Foundation is pleased to announce grant awards for the following 2018 projects:
Access Community Health Centers
Whole Health Groups
Visits will focus on providing a variety of care, including conventional and complementary medicine, self-care and community to patients with metabolic syndrome, which includes those with hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol and obesity. Group visits are co-led by an Access Physician specializing in integrative medicine, a Behavioral Health Consultant and a Registered Dietitian.
Award: $3,000
Aurora Health Care Inc.
Fruit and Vegetable Prescription Program: Making healthier food consumption more affordable in Milwaukee communities
The goal is to improve access to fresh produce by removing financial barriers and promote utilization of a local farmer’s market located in the community in which most of the program’s participants live. The initial aim is to increase dietary intake of fruit and vegetables. Secondarily, to analyze whether this leads to improvement in various bio-markers of chronic disease. Proposed methods were developed from a similar pilot program at a different clinic in Milwaukee.
Award: $5,000 (funding from the Henry A. and Irene S. Anderson Fund)
Brown County UW-Extension Community Gardens Program
Youth Farmers’ Market Program
A coalition working with teens who have been in foster care for a number of years will teach life skills through the Extension’s Garden Program by implementing a youth farmers’ market. This fills a programming gap for older youth and focuses on job training and improved self-esteem, health and self-efficacy.
Award: $4,390
Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin Foundation
Reach Out and Read (ROR) Wisconsin
Reach Out and Read (ROR) Wisconsin gives young children a foundation for success by incorporating books into pediatric care and encouraging families to read aloud tougher. During well-child visits, children receive a new, developmentally and culturally appropriate book to take home and parents receive a prescription for reading aloud. ROR serves all children, with an emphasis on those living in poverty, to ensure they are school ready.
Award: $10,000
Columbia-St Mary’s, Ascension Health Care
Pain Navigators Reduce Opioid Use
Community Health Workers (CHW) will navigate ED acute pain patients with opioid prescriptions to better pain management and resolution. The CHW will receive a warm hand off from ED staff and contact patients within 12 hours. CHWs meet, then continue by phone until pain resolution or provider follow up. Pain education with non-pharmacologic/ pharmacologic pain management is covered. Outcomes include pain tablet use, time to pain resolution, additional ED use and an economic analysis.
Award: $10,000 (funding from the Henry and Irene Anderson Fund, the PIC Wisconsin Fund, and the James and Clara Joss Memorial Research Trust)
Grow La Crosse, Inc
HUG Garden
Will build the HUG (Hintgen Urban Garden) to serve over 350 students at Hintgen Elementary School. The garden will serve as an educational platform to teach garden education and allow space for the buddy reading program. Will host open garden time during recess. Children will plant, tend, harvest and eat produce from the gardens during hands-on educational opportunities at HUG.
Award: $2,500
Medical College of Wisconsin—Doctors as Teachers
Doctors as Teachers: Nutrition Education for Children
Doctors as Teachers (DAT) brings medical students into third grade classrooms at St. Marcus Lutheran School to teach nutrition lessons geared towards comprehension levels and cultural context. Learning and satisfaction of the students will be tracked as part of assessment process.
Award: $2,400
Sixteenth Street Community Health Centers
Healthy Choices
A bilingual, family-based program that empowers participants to adopt a more active lifestyle and healthier eating patterns (not the same as diet) and assists individuals and families in building their capacity for making health-minded decisions for the incorporation of more physical activity in their daily lives and for the selection of healthy food items.
Award: $5,000
The University of Wisconsin-Madison, School of Medicine and Public Health, Department of Family Medicine and Community Health
Careers in the health professions: a science enrichment afterschool program for at-risk elementary school children
This program will provide after school education focused on careers in health professions for at risk children. The inter-professional group will run an after school seminar every month within the school’s current focus on STEM activities. Through interactive enrichment activities, the children will learn about different careers and stimulate new knowledge in the sciences using a modification of the “ladder” program which provides role models and expands children’s future goals.
Award: $4,260
Western Wisconsin Health
Resiliency Program
To build a resiliency program into curriculum for teens in the Baldwin-Woodville School District. The current adult resilience program model is based on connecting physical health to mental and emotional health through improving nutrition, increasing physical activity, adding mindfulness and relaxation based meditation, in addition to cognitive-behavioral therapy based coping skills and creating support systems.
Award: $3,500 (funding from 2017 annual event donations)
Wisconsin Literacy, Inc.—Wisconsin Health Literacy Division
Let’s Talk About Pain Medicines
Wisconsin Health Literacy (WHL) will deliver 14 educational workshops, “Let’s Talk About Pain Medicines” to adults in select communities on how to safely and effectively use prescription opioids. WHL will seek Society member physicians to facilitate the workshops. This project is modeled after its successful “Let’s Talk About Medicines” project sponsored by the Foundation in the past, using an easy-to-read workbook. Fact sheets on opioid use will also be distributed to participants at the workshops.
Award: $10,000 (funding from 2017 annual event donations)
Wisconsin Medical Society
The Society’s Annual Meeting CME: Mental and Behavioral Health
This project will focus on the stigma associated with mental and behavioral health in both a broader social context and within the medical profession, with the goal of increasing awareness, knowledge and providing resources to improve care.
Award: $6,000 (funding from the PIC Wisconsin Fund)
Wisconsin Society of Addiction Medicine (WISAM)
Addiction Treatment Support Webinars for Rural Wisconsin
Develop and implement webinars related to timely topics in the treatment of substance use disorders that complement, but do not compete with the Society’s opioid training. The target audience is primary care providers in rural parts of Wisconsin who receive little support and education for evidence-based treatment of substance use disorders. The developers of the webinars are local experts who have a more clear understanding of Wisconsin’s rural issues and barriers to care.
Award: $6,000 (funding from the Charles W. Landis, MD Memorial Fund)