Staff members sitting in chairs and laughing
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A senior living / higher education partnership is working to develop age-friendly initiatives while also addressing the industry’s workforce challenges. 

Goodwin House Inc. Chief Business Development Officer Andy Siegel recently joined the George Washington University Center for Aging, Health and Humanities as its associate director for community engagement to elevate those initiatives and create a nursing pipeline for both undergraduate and graduate-level nursing students.

The partnership, Siegel told McKnight’s Senior Living, will create a clinical rotation program for nurses to cycle through the Alexandra, VA-based senior living and healthcare services provider’s communities and programs. Siegel said the program will provide earlier exposure for nursing students to post-acute and long-term care services and senior living much earlier than traditional programs.

“We’re working on ways we can both proactively, within the content of their curriculum, teach about the different pieces of the post-acute and long-term care spectrum,” Siegel said. “They also will have the opportunity to rotate through our organizations, because we have all those different businesses — including primary care in primary care, skilled nursing, home health, hospice and palliative care — so they can learn how incredible it is to work with older adults.”

The partnership expands on a collaboration between the two entities that already provides clinical rotations at Goodwin House facilities for geriatric, hospice and palliative medicine fellows and the GW Master of Health Administration program. 

Siegel said the two entities also are trying to develop a more interdisciplinary approach to teaching nurses, health administration and physical therapist students in addition to physician fellows. 

Last fall, Siegel began co-leading the GW Center for Aging, Health and Humanities’ Age-Friendly Scholars program. The five-part speaker series brings medical fellows and physician scholars together with executives from around the country to learn about what’s happening in the long-term care and post-acute care fields.

Siegel also has been on the faculty for two years at GW’s Milken Institute School of Public Health, where he teaches a master’s-level course on post-acute care management and leadership.

“GW’s age-friendly efforts align with the Goodwin House mission to support, honor and uplift the lives of older adults, and we look forward to working together to advance age-friendly health systems and age-friendly city initiatives in the national capital region and beyond,” Siegel said. 

GW Center for Aging, Health and Humanities Director Melissa Batchelor, Ph.D., RN-BC, said in a statement that the partnerships will provide opportunities to improve the care of older adults through clinical, research and educational endeavors.

Goodwin House serves 2,200 older adults through its two life plan communities, the Goodwin House at Home program, and healthcare services including home health, rehabilitation, primary care, palliative care, hospice and brain health.