*******SPECIAL NOTICE*******
The 5th Annual MS AHEC Symposium, "Measuring Mississippi's Health Progress", scheduled for Tuesday, September 15, 2009 will be rescheduled for early Spring 2010. Please visit this site soon to get updated information. We appreciate your support and willingness to be a part of this event and sincerely hope that we can count on your continued support in the upcoming year. We look forward to seeing you at our 2010 Spring Symposium.
Mississippi Center for Health Workforce (MCHW):
In recent years, the Mississippi AHEC has focused on enhancing the availability of relevant and accurate data to develop a health professional pipeline as well as to recruit/retain health professionals. Access to this data also would facilitate evidence-based health legislation and health policy, with the ultimate intention of increasing program funding.
Currently there is no one place anyone in search of health workforce information can go to access health workforce data or reports. The Mississippi AHEC Program Office was interested in facilitating the consistent funding of that line of work and coordinated with Mississippi State University and the Mississippi Department of Health to bring together physicians, dentists, professional associations, and other stakeholders to discuss possibilities of institutionalizing funding for an annual evaluation of physicians and other health care professionals. Extensive meetings during 2007 pointed out data deficits and the possible benefits of collecting, analyzing, and reporting workforce data. This information led to the establishment of the Mississippi Center for Health Workforce (MCHW) as a statewide health care workforce data clearinghouse.
Since funding for the MCHW was problematic in a state that has not had the benefit of good data and succinct reports, we realized that the regional AHEC for northeast Mississippi could be one means to facilitate this work. To better inform Mississippi’s pipeline programs, the Northeast Mississippi AHEC was created at Mississippi State University to—in part—complete an annual assessment of the health care workforce, work with other regional AHECs to develop recruitment plans based on that report and to disseminate the resulting data to health professionals and policymakers across the state. W ithin the Northeast Mississippi AHEC we created a structure called the Mississippi Center for Health Workforce (MCHW); data driven analyses and reports are situated within this center. To our knowledge, this is an infrequently utilized structure to inform the development of pipeline programs.
T.D.O.T. (Tommorrow's Dentist Office Today) - North Central Mississippi AHEC
The North Central MS AHEC coordinated it's 2nd Annual community outreach project with the UMMC School of Dentistry's Community Health Outreach Project Group and Mississippi State Department of Health.
Under the leadership of Melina Johnson, the Community Health Outrach Project Group is a group of dental students that provide dental services and receive hands on experience in the community through outreach projects.
These efforts were facilitated through the TDOT; a moblie dental unit. The School of Dentistry's Community Health Outreach Project Group played an intricate role in providing free dental screenings and limited services to adults and children in the community. Efforts affected Coahoma County Mississippi and surrounding areas; providing oral health care for the area headstarts and families, services were provided for 120 children and 65 adults from the NC MS AHEC service area.
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