Fourth-year medical student Johanna Balas was recently awarded a 2022 Gold Student Summer Fellowship by the Arnold P. Gold Foundation to fund her project “Implementing a Virtual Reality (VR) Training Program for Certified Nursing Assistants (CNA) Providing Care for Persons with Dementia.”
During her project, Balas will be mentored by Neelum T. Aggarwal, MD, professor, Department of Neurological Sciences and RUSH Alzheimer's Disease Center and will be receiving funding from the foundation to support her work. Bala will be working to integrate a VR-based online and in-person hybrid curriculum in the training of CNAs from Chicago Methodist Senior Services, a nonprofit offering memory care and long-term skilled nursing for older adults. The curriculum is designed to instill empathy and confidence in CNAs as they serve as primary caregivers and often provide the most meaningful daily human contact with their patients.
The VR training experience will enable CNAs to see the world through a patient’s eyes and understand better what it is like to experience dementia. The curriculum is designed to instill empathy and confidence in CNAs as they serve as primary caregivers and often provide the most meaningful daily human contact with their patients. Balas’ project will continue the work of a successful pilot program in summer 2020 that showed traditional didactic lectures with VR-based curriculum provided multidimensional learning and peer support for participating CNAs.This new project will work to develop sustainable training program for CNAs and memory care directors.
The Gold Student Summer Fellowship program offers opportunities for medical students to undertake a research or service project related to community health and to develop skills to become a compassionate, relationship-centered physician.
You can learn more about Balas’ project and other fellowship projects here.
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