Many people overlook the short- and long-term costs of financial caregiving, a growing problem that financial advisors and employers can help address, according to a new report by the TIAA Institute and the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing (Penn Nursing).

This endowed program – created from a $2 million gift to Penn Nursing by former University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann and her husband Michael Doyle – provides financial aid for exemplary undergraduate and graduate nursing students, supplementing their education with tailored learning to help shape nurse leaders who deliver exceptional evidence-based care, design research, inform policy, spark innovation, and advocate for social justice world-wide.

Life becomes very complex for patients who need to manage pain due to cancer or other illness while still receiving methadone treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD). Methadone is a highly effective medication for treating OUD, however, the current U.S. regulatory framework mandates that methadone for OUD is exclusively accessible through federally approved Opioid Treatment Programs, with many individuals required to make daily visits for supervised dosing. This requirement places a significant burden on those with competing health needs, limited access to transportation, living in rural areas or in regions with few or no treatment programs.

Pamela Z. Cacchione, PhD, CRNP, BC, FGSA, FAAN, the Ralston House Term Chair in Gerontological Nursing, Professor of Geropsychiatric Nursing in the Department of Family and Community Health, and a Nurse Scientist at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center will be the 2024 recipient of Penn Nursing’s prestigious Norma M. Lang Award for Scholarly Practice and Policy. The award, given biennially to a Penn Nursing faculty member or a graduate from the School’s doctoral program who has made a distinguished contribution to nursing through scholarly practice, honors Norma M. Lang, PhD, the Professor and Dean Emerita of Penn Nursing, for her world-renowned contributions to health policy and practice.

The Penn Artificial Intelligence and Technology Collaboratory for Healthy Aging (PennAITech) – made up of Penn’s School of Nursing, the Perelman School of Medicine, and other departments across the University – focuses on identifying developing, evaluating, commercializing, and disseminating innovative technology and artificial intelligence methods/software to support aging. This is year two for the collaboratory – made possible through a grant from the National Institute on Aging – and it is providing more than $2.3 M in funding to ten pilot projects.

Earlier this year Penn Nursing received a $1 million grant from the Bedford Falls Foundation – DAF, a donor-advised fund established by Philanthropists William (Bill) E. Conway Jr., co-founder and co-chairman of The Carlyle Group, and his wife, Joanne, to support a total of 40 high-merit students over a four-year period who are enrolled in a Penn degree program. Ten students will be selected every year to receive this support.

Recently, Penn Nursing and the Penn Artificial Intelligence and Technologies Collaboratory for Healthy Aging (PennAITech) – funded by the National Institute on Aging – invited experts from academia, industry, and government to participate in a two-day (December 5-6, 2023) roundtable discussion to discuss challenges and opportunities in the use of Large language models (LLMs) and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in gerontology. LLMs and the platforms they support such as ChatGPT have experienced an exponential growth in popularity and use in recent months.

Last year, 354 people died from opioid overdoses in Camden County, according to the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General, which in 2022 recorded an estimated 15,407 administrations statewide of naloxone, also known by the brand name Narcan. This year, New Jersey launched an initiative allowing anyone 14 and older to anonymously obtain naloxone for free at more than 600 participating pharmacies across the state. Camden County, just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, has also installed secure NaloxBoxes in every public school.