MSHAC Program Plan Evaluation Strategy: A Manual For Program Leaders
Creators: name: McWilliams, Andrew
Publisher: name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries
Year: 2006

description: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Mobile Student Health Action Coalition (MSHAC) is an interdisciplinary, student-led program that strives to serve the local community and enrich early professional student education. It is comprised completely of volunteers: the students who provide the services, the faculty preceptors who mentor the students, and the referring providers and their patients. MSHAC student volunteers are early in their professional training and are recruited from seven healthcare disciplines: medicine, nursing, occupational therapy, pharmacy, physical therapy, public health, and social work. Students are placed together onto teams with the disciplines represented on each team being determined by the needs of the patients, who are referred to the program. For the entire academic year, one team is paired with one older adult patient. Persons referred to MSHAC typically are community dwelling older adults and are: people who have both complex medical and social needs and are challenging to care for in the traditional clinic setting. They are referred by the UNC geriatric clinic and community-based primary care practitioners. By tailoring the configuration of the team to the needs of the patients, the students are poised to address the most salient issues that the older adults face. Student teams are encouraged to form connections with community agencies, bridge communication gaps between providers, and teach those patients who desire a better understanding of their health issues. The patients' referring providers stay in regular contact with the student teams. The student teams receive additional mentorship and guidance through meetings once a semester with volunteer multidisciplinary faculty clinicians, fellows, and residents specializing in geriatrics. MSHAC affords students the opportunity to create rich relationships with older adults in the home setting. This context allows for the identification of underlying problems that may not be transparent or easily fixed within a clinic setting. As a result, MSHAC is an invaluable service to older patients and their healthcare providers, as well as an excellent medium for enriching students' understandings about the health care, environmental, and social issues facing older adults. This Program Plan and Evaluation Strategy is meant to serve as an introduction and comprehensive, operations manual for new MSHAC leaders. The aim is to provide leaders with an explanation of MSHAC's origins, rationale, mission, goals, and objectives. In addition to providing a basis for understanding the basic tenets of the program, this manual will act as a reference and guide for the program's structures and processes. Thus, also included within the manual are tools such as an organizational chart, a program plan, a logic model, an administrative timeline, an explanation of participants' roles, and a budget. Finally, an evaluation strategy is provided -because for any program to be successful, leaders must constantly evaluate and make improvements to its structures, processes, and outcomes. Each year leaders should modify this manual to reflect the current state of the program for the benefit of the next year's leaders.