As anyone who has been to a hospital or long-term care facility can attest, nurses are a vital part of a care team and often have the most direct and intimate contact with patients. As a result, nurses are well positioned to identify patient needs and often have innovative ideas on ways to improve the healthcare experience.
Through a continued partnership with the Rita and Alex Hillman Foundation (Hillman) AVDF is helping fund early-stage, nurse-led projects aimed at improving care for vulnerable patient populations facing serious illness. Often these projects are pre-evidence base, and the AVDF and Hillman funding provides valuable resources that the project leaders can utilize to gather initial evidence and can leverage when applying for future grant awards.
“Early-stage funding is critically important for the ability to engage in development of programs that are truly innovative and founded on principles of design-thinking. This approach to supporting the pilot-stage of program development is the only way we will be able to solve the complex problems we are facing in serving the most vulnerable in need of health care services,” said Casey Shillam, PhD, RN, Dean of the School of Nursing at the University of Portland and 2019 grant recipient.
In 2023 AVDF and Hillman continued their partnership, providing funding for innovative ideas to build the evidence and launch interventions to improve the health and healthcare of marginalized populations.
Interest in the Hillman Emergent Innovation: Serious Illness and End of Life (HSEI) program has remained strong, with nearly 300 participants joining the informational webinar and 53 project teams submitting a Letter of Intent, with applications hailing from diverse groups of organizations across the U.S. The quality of the 2023 submissions ranked among the best since 2018, when Hillman initially launched the program.
While during 2021 to 2022 there were challenges to maintain a consistently high number of and quality of applications, given the impact of COVID on research efforts and attrition of nurses in the field, the 2023 cycle saw a 33% increase in applications since the prior year.
Full proposals were received from 14 invited applicants. Of these, nine were awarded funding. Eight received standard $50,000 grant awards, and one received a larger $100,000 award, given organizational capacity and potential for impact. Collectively, this cohort of projects will help catalyze nursing-driven efforts to elevate care for communities that face discrimination and indifference. The cohort included (among others) a program to partner with patient, family and nurse navigator collaborators to co-develop a financial self-advocacy intervention for rural cancer patients; and a community-based, nurse-led intervention to develop a culturally concordant, end-of-life doula model to increase social support and improved care for seriously ill LGBTQ+ patients.
Throughout 2023 the staff at Hillman surveyed current and recent Emergent Innovation awardees. Of 24 supported teams, 20 (83%) continue to expand on their initial proposed work. Key takeaways from the initial assessment are that the awards have made a positive impact across multiple areas; accelerate professional advancement, especially for early-career nurse innovators and nurses of color; and play an important role in securing significant ancillary financial support.
As a result of this success, AVDF and Hillman are continuing their partnership in 2024, with a new round of awards to be announced by year end.
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