Program Rationale

In the 1990s the New York Academy of Medicine made a commitment to answer the question: How can we make the health-care system work better for older adults?

We recognized that making health care more affordable and accessible in the long term would require major policy reforms. But in the short term, people needed help unraveling the current maze of our health-care system.

Our research led us to focus on social workers as the group most capable of handling and negotiating todays complex systems of care. Great, we thought. The more qualified social workers there are in aging, the better the care and support for older adults and their caregivers. When we probed deeper, a clearer picture of the geriatric social work field began to emerge:

• Many social workers with aging specializations are retiring, just as the older adult population boom makes the demand for them greater than ever.
• The field has had difficulty attracting students, driven in part by narrow and inaccurate public perceptions about older adults.
• Many graduate social work programs do not have specialized programs in aging.
• Aging-care employers report that most social work graduates are unable to hit the ground running; there is an acute demand for qualified professionals in the field.

The Hartford Partnership Program for Aging Education (HPPAE) was created in response to these interconnected trends. It offers a new field approach that exposes students to older adults beyond the nursing-home setting and blurs the line between classroom learning and internships so graduates are prepared for the realities of the workplace.

Today, the program is active in more than five dozen social work schools across the country. Student recruitment is up and more social workers are embarking on careers in aging care. We hope this manual will inspire you to be leaders in the movement to grow this critical workforce, because the country needs more social workers in aging. And this is only the beginning.

HPPAE is a nationally recognized training model that has proven to be effective at recruiting students who will go onto pursue careers in the aging field.

• HPPAE has now been implemented in 72 graduated schools and 33 states
• HPPAE has graduated 2,669 as of 2011
• Nearly 80% of HPPAE grads have gone onto careers in the aging field
• Among students who had obtained a job prior to graduation, most were employed in case/case-management, long-term care, or hospital settings.