Articles from Jewish Healthcare Foundation

The Pennsylvania Perinatal Quality Collaborative (PA PQC) is pleased to announce the recipients of its second annual Perinatal Quality Improvement Designation Awards which were presented at its annual conference in Altoona on May 21, 2025.

Today, the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) announced a $2 million grant to the Jewish Healthcare Foundation (JHF) to help rebuild the under-resourced nursing home workforce by bolstering provider and community-based training programs in partnership with nursing homes and the SEIU-PA located in Pennsylvania’s Appalachian counties. This investment will be matched by partners in the project, ultimately resulting in a $5 million investment that will train and upskill hundreds of frontline nursing home workers by 2027.

Jewish Healthcare Foundation:

With funding from the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services and the Pennsylvania Department of Health, the Jewish Healthcare Foundation (JHF) has awarded over $1 million across three regional grantees to standup a statewide perinatal behavioral health consultation and access program for providers in prenatal, labor/delivery, and postpartum care settings.

For Pennsylvania Maternal Health Awareness Day, the Jewish Healthcare Foundation contributed to a statewide collective plan to raise awareness of recommendations to improve maternal health and reduce racial/ethnic disparities in Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania, pregnancy-associated mortality rates are two times greater for non-Hispanic Blacks than non-Hispanic whites. The plan includes recommendations that the State Administration could achieve in a 12-month period. It also describes how stakeholders can support the priorities.

Proposals are being sought from interested and qualified Pennsylvania organizations for projects between $15,000 - $100,000 per year for up to two years providing food-is-medicine style programs to make healthy, nutritious foods available to low-income pregnant people and demonstrating the impact of diet on their overall health, maternity outcomes, and infant outcomes.

The Pennsylvania Teaching Nursing Home project will test and validate a better model of care for the Commonwealth’s frailest nursing home residents, with support from the Jewish Healthcare Foundation (JHF). The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the clinical, financial, social, emotional, and infection control vulnerabilities of our current facilities—for residents and workers. The urgency to learn from a pandemic that resulted in the deaths of over 184,000 residents and staff in long-term care became apparent. The project will reexamine a model of care that proved successful in the 1980s: a “teaching nursing home” environment where students, faculty, and healthcare workers collaborate to improve care for residents. The contemporary model provides opportunities for researchers to experiment and improve methods of care, and for students to foster careers in nursing homes and geriatrics.