Partnerships That Move Health Forward
These are just a few Wisconsin Partnership Program (WPP) grantees whose work is positively impacting health in Wisconsin.
See more on our Featured Grantees page.
Growing the Rural Health Care Workforce
One of the Wisconsin Partnership Program’s earliest education grants provided essential start-up funding for the Wisconsin Academy for Rural Medicine (WARM) to address rural physician shortages facing Wisconsin communities. Initially established under a Community-Academic Partnership Fund grant, WARM is now one of several rural medicine training programs in the UW School of Medicine and Public Health and has become a renowned training opportunity for medical students interested in rural medicine. The program has graduated 274 medical students since 2007, with ninety one percent of graduates practicing in Wisconsin.
Read how WARM and other rural training programs are improving health in Wisconsin.
Reducing the Threat of Infectious Disease
In 2007, WPP awarded Dr. Bruce Klein, a professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, a Collaborative Health Sciences Program grant for the Wisconsin Infectious Disease Drug Discovery project. The project aimed to address the alarming rise of antibiotic resistant infections through discovery of novel compounds that could lead to new antimicrobial drugs. Data from this WPP-funded project led directly to additional funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), and a strategic research grant from WPP to establish the Wisconsin Center for Infectious Disease (WisCID).
Following the successful creation of WisCID, the center received a five-year, $16 million NIH Center for Excellence in Translational Research grant focused on anti-microbial drug discovery. Led by Dr. David Andes, a professor in the UW Department of Medicine, this project has resulted in the discovery of hundreds of novel compounds which are being tested for development as antibiotics, with several moving towards FDA approval.
Read more about the creation of WisCID.
Improving Safety in Wisconsin’s Assisted Living Communities
In 2016, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) was awarded a Community Impact Grant to expand access to the Wisconsin Coalition for Collaborative Excellence in Assisted Living (WCCEAL) and improve the quality of care for Wisconsin’s seniors residing in assisted living facilities through the implementation of a tested quality improvement infrastructure. WCCEAL is the only organization of its kind in the United States, and with the help of this grant they were able to increase membership 28 percent and improve the quality of life for residents at assisted living communities in 55 Wisconsin counties. The initiative has established benchmarks for important safety indicators such as falls, hospital readmission and medication management. Currently there are 494 participating assisted living communities, and more than 11,000 Wisconsin senior occupants who benefit from this project. The work is sustained through an agreement with DHS.
Read more about the use of data to improve quality in assisted living in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association.
Developing Public Health Leaders to Serve the State
A WPP-funded education initiative is helping address the long-standing shortage of public health leaders in Wisconsin and across the nation. Since 2004, the Wisconsin Population Health Services Fellowship, a cornerstone of WPP’s educational investments, has placed early-career public health workers in government and community-based organizations. The fellows support public health programming for local health initiatives and build their skills as public health leaders throughout this two-year service and training program. To date, more than 100 fellows from diverse backgrounds have served at more than 50 placement sites throughout Wisconsin, including urban, rural and tribal communities. Eighty percent of recent fellowship graduates have gone on to fill public health leadership positions in Wisconsin.
Connecting Clinics, Campuses and Communities
With funding from a WPP Community Impact Grant, Marshfield Clinic Health System (MCHS) has established a Community Connections Team (CCT), in partnership with UW-Eau Claire and UW-Stevens Point. The team connects patients with community resources to help them overcome obstacles to health improvement, including accessing resources for food, housing, transportation and other vital needs. More than 140 students from UW-Eau Claire and UW-Stevens Point who are planning to enter a variety of health professions have been trained to staff the CCT. To date, Marshfield health providers have screened 53,700 patients. Of those, 7,600 were referred to the CCT. As a result, CCT staff made more than 17,000 referrals to agencies such as food banks, dental clinics, energy and transportation services and more to address critical patient needs. MCHS is incorporating a new software platform to support this work and sustain the program beyond the grant.
Read about the Community Connections Team.
Preventing Blindness in Rural Wisconsin
Diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of blindness in working-age Wisconsin adults, yet less than half of the people at risk for this condition are screened annually. Access to vision care is a significant barrier. SMPH assistant professor Dr. Yao Liu received a WPP grant to partner with Mile Bluff Medical Center in Mauston, Wisconsin to use telemedicine to improve access to vision screenings. Dr. Liu and her research team have leveraged their findings to obtain a $4.4 million grant from the National Eye Institute. The multi-center clinical trial will test this vision-saving program at eight rural health systems across the country. The findings have the potential to improve access to eye care, and the translation into practice will help meet the growing needs of our aging population.
Read about Dr. Liu’s work on vision screening access.
UW System Students Bolster Health Care Workforce
COVID-19 placed tremendous pressure on Wisconsin’s health care facilities. To support Wisconsin’s health care workforce during and after a pandemic surge, the UW–Madison School of Nursing, in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin System and WPP, developed a program to provide tuition support to enrolled students who completed at least 50 hours of work in a Wisconsin clinical or health care setting. Ultimately, 1,689 UW System students across 13 UW System campuses participated in the project, serving 79 different zip codes across the state and providing critical workforce infrastructure when Wisconsin health systems needed it most.
Read the tuition program outcome report.
Transforming Health for Black Women and Families
The Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness (FFBWW) is working to eliminate the health disparities impacting Black women in Dane County and Wisconsin, where Black birth disparities and racial health disparities are among the worst in the nation. With an initial four-year grant from WPP, the FFBWW expanded its staff and capacity, strengthened collaborations with health systems and community partners and realized one of its central priorities: the creation of a community health worker program. The FFBWW then successfully competed for a WPP Community Impact Grant to support the creation of the Well Black Woman Institute, an innovative leadership development program. The FBWW also plays a key role on another WPP-funded project, Connect Rx, a new model of clinical and community care coordination that has served more than 200 pregnant women in Dane County, providing support needed to promote a healthy peri-partum period. With support from the WPP, the Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness is advancing its mission to transform how Black women experience health and build solutions that can be replicated across the state.
Learn about WPP projects led by the Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness.
Supporting the Health of Wisconsin Farmers
In 2018 the Southwest Wisconsin Community Action Program received initial funding from WPP to address the mental health crisis facing Wisconsin farmers by providing training in suicide and crisis prevention and stress management. The project’s success led to another WPP grant in 2020 to develop Farm Well Wisconsin, an initiative to support the well-being of the farming community through community trainings and resources focused on stress, rural mental health and suicide prevention. Farm Well’s efforts have extended beyond their service territory through statewide coalitions and partners, with more than 700 rural community members and agribusiness professionals trained in peer support, community resources and suicide prevention. Farm Well is also building capacity for rural health providers. They conducted training for more than 75 health providers, residents and medical students and have been asked to join statewide coalitions and steering committees related to farmer mental health and rural suicide prevention.
Listen to the Wisconsin Public Radio story. (January 2023)
