After seven years of working closely with a team from New York City’s Department for the Aging on a new educational intervention, Linda White-Ryan, Ph.D., and Janna Heyman, Ph.D., have developed an intervention that has proved successful on both fronts.

“As a person ages, there are many changes that take place in their life, such as the way we metabolize any substance, even if it’s aspirin in combination with alcohol, said White-Ryan, associate dean of academic affairs at the Graduate School of Social Service (GSS).

“We wanted to see if this educational intervention could really make a difference in the understanding of older adults about any of the possible risks, and how they communicate with their health care providers,” said Heyman, a professor and the Henry C. Ravazzin Chair at the GSS.

White-Ryan and Heyman began working on the intervention in 2016 with funding from the New York Public Trust.

Their research partners included Thomas Caprio, M.D., a professor at the University of Rochester Medical Center, Jacquline Berman, director of research at the New York Department for the Aging, and Manoj Pardasani, Ph.D., a former member of the GSS faculty who is now provost and vice president of academic affairs at Hunter College.

In 2018, after two years of design work, the team conducted a randomized control trial in older adult centers in Staten Island, Manhattan, and the Bronx. Participants were assigned to either the intervention group or a control group that received traditional services. The intervention group received educational material about health, physical and other aging changes, medication use, and possible adverse interactions between alcohol and medications, as well as strategies to initiate communication with physicians and other healthcare providers.

The authors of the study, which was published last fall in the journal Gerontology & Geriatrics Education, also made the information given to the intervention group available to the control group after the study was complete.

The intervention was titled Communicating with your Health Care Providers. It involved two meetings, held 10 days apart, with a total of 115 participants—55 in the intervention group and 60 in the control group. The median age of participants was 72, and 60% were women.

Role-Playing to Instill Confidence

The meetings were conducted in group settings, which was key to the intervention’s success, said Heyman.

“This intervention was so powerful because it allowed older adults to really be in a room with their friends and peers and say, ‘It’s OK, we need to ask important questions to our physicians and pharmacists,” she said.

The sessions also involved role-playing, with participants attempting to have conversations with actors portraying clearly distracted healthcare professionals. They were coached on how to be assertive and ask questions they might otherwise have shied away from.

A Growing Need for a Rapidly Population

The need to help older adults feel confident about asking their doctors for information is rapidly growing. By 2034, the U.S. Census Bureau has predicted there will be more people aged 65 and over than those under 18 in the United States. At the same time, the National Council on Aging has predicted that the number of older adults struggling with substance abuse, depression, and anxiety is expected to reach 15 million by 2030.

Results

Surveys administered to participants afterward found that those in the intervention group displayed a greater awareness of the implications of combining alcohol with prescription drugs and more confidence in their ability to communicate with their doctors and pharmacists.

Although the intervention took place pre-pandemic, White-Ryan said the reception that they received from participants was so positive, they’re hopeful that it can be replicated in the future.

“These are the physiological changes and emotional changes that happen as we age, but you can have good health, and communication with your health care providers is a big piece of that,” she said.

“So this intervention gave them important information and taught them about engaging with health care providers, advocating for themselves, and reaching out to get the information so that they age well or as well as possible.”

Photos by Bruce Gilbert

Six distinguished faculty members were honored on March 13 for their achievements in securing externally funded research grants at the third annual Sponsored Research Day on the Rose Hill campus.

The University Research Council and Office of Research presented the Outstanding Externally Funded Research Awards (OEFRA) to recognize the high quality and impact of the honorees’ sponsored research within the last three years and how their work has enhanced Fordham’s reputation—both nationally and globally.

Faculty were honored in five separate categories and were given awards by Jonathan Crystal, Ph.D., interim provost, associate vice president, and associate chief academic officer.

Humanities: George Demacopoulos, Ph.D., professor of theology and the Father John Meyendorff & Patterson Family Chair of Orthodox Christian Studies, and Aristotle Papanikolaou, Ph.D., professor of theology and the Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture

Demacopoulos and Papanikolaou, co-directors of Fordham’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center, shared the award for the Humanities category. Demacopoulos has received awards totaling $928,000 in the past three years, while Papanikolaou has received a total of $888,000. Last April, they secured two grants totaling $610,000 that will be used to fund a multiyear research project devoted toward the issue of human rights.

Interdisciplinary Research: Su-Je Cho, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Childhood Special Education at the Graduate School of Education.

Cho, an expert in the field of special education, has received two external grants totaling more than $2.7 million from the U.S. Department of Education and other foundations in the past three years. Her interdisciplinary project will produce approximately 40 professionals in special education and school psychology, which are the greatest shortage areas in the field of education.

Junior Faculty Research: Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Theology

Gribetz has received six external grants totaling $55,000 from the prestigious National Endowment for Humanities and other foundations in the past three years. Her research focuses on the history of time in antiquity and the important role that religious traditions and practices have played in the history of time. In 2017, she received the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise, alongside nine other young scholars, from the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

Sciences: Steven Franks, Ph.D., Professor in Biological Sciences

Franks has received five grants totaling more than $5.3 million from the National Science Foundation in the past three years. The results of the studies funded by these grants have been published in 17 peer-reviewed scientific publications since 2016. The papers, which are in high impact journals such as Evolution, Molecular Ecology, and American Journal of Botany, have been widely cited. His work has helped to advance our understanding of responses of plant populations to climate change and the genetic basis of these responses.

Social Sciences: Janna Heyman, Ph.D., Professor of Social Service and Endowed Chair of the Henry C. Ravazzin Center on Aging and Intergenerational Studies at the Graduate School of Social Service

Heyman, who is also director of Fordham’s Children & Families Institute center, has received 10 grants totaling more than $3 million from a variety of external foundations in the past three years. Last year, she co-edited, along with Graduate School of Social Service Associate Dean Elaine Congress, D.S.W, Health and Social Work: Practice, Policy and Research (Springer, 2018). She has taught social work research, advanced research, and social welfare policy courses in Fordham’s master of social work program, as well as policy implementation in the doctoral social work program.

Organized by the Office of Research and the University Research Council and sponsored by the University Research Compliance Council and the Office of Sponsored Programs, the daylong event featuring a keynote speech by Denise Clark, Ph.D., Associate Vice President for Research Administration, University of Maryland at College Park.

A forum of science researchers featured Thomas Daniels, Ph.D., director of the Louis Calder Center, Deborah Denno, Ph.D, director of the Neuroscience and Law Center, Silvia Finnemann, Ph.D., director of the Center for Cancer, Genetic Diseases, and Gene Regulation, J.D. Lewis, director of the Urban Ecology Center, Amy Roy, Ph.D., director of the Pediatric Emotion Regulation Lab, and Falguni Sen, Ph.D., director of the Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center.

After decades of working as an administrator in New York City schools, she decided to professionalize the work she had been doing in an unofficial capacity for years. In February, she will earn a Master’s of Social Work at the Graduate School of Social Service at Fordham’s Westchester campus.

“I saw what happened to vulnerable children,” she said. “I wanted to help prevent the problem rather than look for a quick fix.”

Blumenstock married into a family from an underserved neighborhood in the 1980s. She used Spanish as a way to communicate with her mother-in-law, and found that her bilingual skills were also an asset in working with others through the crack and AIDS epidemics that ravaged the city during the late twentieth century.

Her personal experiences at home and at work brought her face-to-face with the challenges facing alcoholic families, drug addicts, people with special needs, AIDS patients, and neglected or abused children.

“I found that no matter the problem, we were always fighting the same battle. You try to advocate for someone with a particular issue and then you fight same battle all over again for someone else with the same issue,” she said.

“Those experiences became the fuel for me to change careers. It just made me want to fight on a higher level. There are things that need to be solved on a social level rather than putting the onus on the person that’s suffering.”

She said she appreciated Fordham’s emphasis on human rights and social justice. She quickly acclimated to the rigorous leadership track and eventually found herself working as a graduate assistant to Janna Heyman, Ph.D., professor and Henry C. Ravazzin Chair in Gerontology.

Building on Heyman’s research, which evaluates the effects of bringing older adults in contact with children, Kelsey’s project focuses on bringing older adults in contact with young immigrant mothers and their children.

“These moms, especially the ones who don’t speak English, are incredibly isolated, since their husbands sometimes work six or seven days a week,” she said.

“We had been studying just two generations, the elderly and youth, and I think that by bringing seniors into contact with adults and with children, all three generations benefit.”

Blumenstock has actively pitched the program design to a senior center in Westchester and an agency serving at risk children, and hopes to continue lobbying for the program design after she graduates. For now she’s looking forward to finishing the semester and launching her new career.

“As of now, I’m a student,” she said. “But not for long.”

Lee’s area of scholarly research is in long-term care policy, chronic illness, and older adult care. She was selected to be one of the first researchers as the Hartford Geriatric Social Work Faculty Scholar Program, a position she held in 1999-2000.

She holds master’s degrees in social work and public administration and a doctorate in social work from Columbia University.

Fordham Westchester’s GSS is home to approximately 350 students. It offers full-time and part-time plans of study to earn a master’s in social work, with concentrations in clinical, human service leadership, community based practice, and leadership and research.

The Westchester location, said Lee, offers students to attend a premier social work program and develop a community of students who are connected to and serve the needs of the larger population of the region.

“We hope that our faculty, students, and our neighbors in the region can become strong partners in building healthy and equitable communities,” she said.

Located in a three-story, state-of-the-art building on 32 acres in West Harrison, New York, Fordham Westchester also offers classes in the University’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies, Gabelli School of Business, Graduate School of Education, and Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education.

— Janet Sassi