Mission and Purpose
The Center for Aging was established in May 2000 with a mission to provide training in geriatrics for working health professionals and health-care students enrolled at The University of Texas El Paso. Between 2000 and 2006, funding to the Center provided access to a lecture series sponsored by the Geriatric Education Center at the University of Texas San Antonio, a rural interdisciplinary training project offered through the Kellogg Clinics, and faculty development in gerontology for nursing faculty through the John A. Hartford Foundation. A grant from the Paso del Norte Foundation funded a large research project, the Ageless Health Needs Assessment, to explore the health needs of seniors in El Paso and Hudspeth Counties in Texas, Doña Ana and Otero Counties in New Mexico, and Ciudad Juarez in Mexico.
Administratively, the Center for Aging is within the School of Nursing, and reports to the Office of the Dean. Dr. Charon Pierson is the current director. She can be contacted at capierson@utep.edu, or by phone at 915.747.8297.
Recent and Current Activities
Dr. Pierson serves as the liaison to the Southwestern Consortium of the Hartford Center for Geriatric Nursing Excellence (Hartford Center) at Arizona State University, College of Nursing & Healthcare Innovation (ASU). The purpose of this Hartford Center is to significantly increase the number of high quality doctoral and post-doctoral level faculty in geriatric nursing needed to teach in graduate and undergraduate academic nursing programs throughout Arizona and surrounding Southwestern states. UTEP is the only school in Texas that participates in this consortium.
Dr. Pierson currently serves on both the Professional Advisory Committee and the Board of Directors for Bien Vivir, a Program of All Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE)
Dr. Pierson has written columns for the El Paso Times on healthy aging (Viva Third Age) with other community and UTEP individuals. Those columns can be found at www.elpasotimes.com in the Lifestyle section.
Working with the Area Agency on Aging Caregiver Education Specialist, we have been instrumental in developing a training program for home caregivers that will lead to certification as either a home aid or a certified nursing assistant through the Anamarc Educational Institute (www.anamarc.com/campus/elpaso/).
In September 2008 we offered a continuing education workshop titled Functional Assessment – A New View of Your Older Patients for nurses in the Midland, Big Spring, and surrounding areas of West Texas. This all-day, interdisciplinary program featured presentations from pharmacy, social work, physical therapy, and nursing and was sponsored jointly by the Center for Aging and Midland Memorial Hospital.
Future Goals
In accord with the mission of the Center to educate the community about aging, we are working on the following projects
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Develop an on-line certificate course for practicing nurse practitioners (NPs) that will allow currently certified family, adult, and acute care NPs to become certified as gerontological NPs. This “alternative eligibility” process is a new program of the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC). (For more information about credentialing see
www.nursecredentialing.org).