By Cheril Lee
Omaha, NE – Thanks to a $300,000 federal stimulus grant, UNMC's College of Nursing will send a Mobile Nurse Managed Clinic into three rural cities starting in May.
UNMC officials made the announcement yesterday. Claudia Chaperon is an Assistant Professor at the College of Nursing, and the project director for the grant. She says the mobile clinic will provide comprehensive geriatric assessments in rural Nebraska where there is a health care provider shortage. Chaperon says teams will go out to the rural areas in the mobile clinic and work with local physicians and nurse practitioners. Additionally, she says the mobile clinic will provide clinical training for UNMC students, "Well, we have 25 geriatric nurse practitioner students right now and about half of them live in rural Nebraska and the beauty of this is they will actually be able to do a comprehensive geriatric assessment before they graduate. Each and every one of them will be able to do that independently. They will be working with us at first, side by side, and by the time they graduate, they will be independent."
The mobile clinic will initially rotate service in Norfolk, Neligh and Red Cloud. The college hopes to expand to other locations in the future.