NEW YORK, March 19, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- To accelerate the development of promising pre-evidence programs that improve care for vulnerable populations, the Rita & Alex Hillman Foundation (RAHF) today released two Requests for Proposals (RFP) – one for the Hillman Emergent Innovation Program and another for the Hillman Serious Illness and End of Life Emergent Innovation Program.
Both programs seek bold, early stage, or untested interventions that address health challenges faced by vulnerable populations including the economically disadvantaged, racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ people, people experiencing homelessness, rural populations, and others.
Each program will award as many as five one-year grants of $50,000 each. The RFP application deadline is Monday, April 29, 2019. For full details, the RFP timeline, and instructions on how to apply, for the Hillman Emergent Innovation Program, please click here. For the Hillman Serious Illness and End of Life Emergent Innovation Program, please click here.
“A key strategy at Hillman has been to create a pipeline of support for innovations at various phases of development, including the earliest stages, which can be a challenging time to find funding, even for the most promising ideas,” said Ahrin Mishan, Executive Director of the Rita & Alex Hillman Foundation. “Supporting innovations that remove barriers to more equitable, high-quality, and person-centered care is central to our mission.”
Bringing extra attention and support to end of life care
While the foundation awarded grants in the Hillman Serious Illness and End of Life Emergent Innovation Program in 2018, this is the first time the program has issued its own public RFP. The decision to create a separate program alongside the original Emergent Innovation Program was grounded in the desire to bring additional attention and resources to innovative work in this vitally important field.
“We believe this is an area in which nursing plays an outsized but sometimes overlooked role,” said Rachael Watman, Vice President of Programs at the Rita & Alex Hillman Foundation. “Creating a dedicated program for new, creative, nurse-driven innovations tailored to the needs of the seriously ill and dying will advance both the knowledge and the care of vulnerable populations.”
Seeking bold early-stage work from a diverse range of applicants
In the belief that transformative ideas are as likely to come from small community care settings as they are from major academic research centers, the foundation welcomes applications from a broad range of institutions, care settings, and practitioners (including nurse clinicians, researchers, postdocs, and adjunct faculty.) Proposals that include one or more of the following qualities will receive priority in the RFP process:
- Creativity; lateral or out-of-the box thinking; disruptive potential
- Engagement of patients, families, caregivers, and/or community organizations
- Inter-professional or multidisciplinary collaboration
- Institutional and community partnerships
- Provision of care in non-hospital settings
- Resourcefulness
A pipeline for nursing-driven innovation
Nursing has a long history of developing innovative solutions to some of society's most daunting health care challenges. The Rita & Alex Hillman Foundation’s three complementary grant programs create a pipeline for innovation: the Hillman Emergent Innovation Program and the Hillman Serious Illness and End of Life Emergent Innovation Program (both described above) seek promising ideas in the earliest experimental stage, while the Hillman Innovations in Care Program supports mature programs with strong preliminary evidence and the Hillman Innovation Dissemination Program helps successful programs with an established evidence base to scale nationally.
ABOUT THE RITA & ALEX HILLMAN FOUNDATION
The Rita & Alex Hillman Foundation’s mission is to improve the lives of patients and their families through nursing-driven innovation. To this end, the foundation cultivates nurse leaders, supports nursing research, and disseminates new models of care that are critical to making the U.S. healthcare system more patient-centered, accessible, equitable, and affordable. The foundation’s goal is to leverage the power of nursing’s unique knowledge to ensure that the healthcare system can deliver the high-quality care patients need and deserve. For more information, please visit www.rahf.org.
Media Contact:
Linda Le, Vice President of Operations, the Rita & Alex Hillman Foundation
linda.le@rahf.org or 212-265-3115