Everyone living in the Circumpolar North should have the opportunity to live a long
and healthy life. However, we live in an environment that can be challenging as we
get older. The physical environment may be difficult to navigate (extreme weather,
changing climate, high costs of living, etc) but it is important to remember that
the social environment also changes for us as we age. As more adults are choosing
to age-in-place and retire at home here in Alaska, we are noticing real gaps in our
knowledge about what healthy aging means to our elders and how we can achieve it in
our Arctic environment.
The Healthy Aging Lab at UAA works to understand the shifting sociocultural landscape
for aging adults and identify service needs to facilitate healthy aging-in-place.
We do this in a variety of ways, from Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR)
projects, to community-engaged courses in health sciences, to individual service-learning
projects—our work aims to benefit not only the student (and future geriatric workforce),
but the senior community as well.
The newest iteration of the Della Keats Health Sciences Program focuses on serving Alaska Native/American Indian high school students interested in healthcare careers.
A new partnership between the University of Alaska Anchorage and the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium will allow healthcare students to complete their clinical rotations at local ANTHC facilities.
The Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC) and the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) have launched a new partnership to prepare the next generation of healthcare professionals and strengthen Alaska’s workforce.
The University of Alaska Anchorage and the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium are teaming up to help train more Alaskans for careers in health care.
Lynn Troyer, an academic advisor for the School of Nursing at the University of Alaska Anchorage, traveled to Bethel as part of the Alaska-Rural Community Overdose Response Project (AK-RCORP).
The UAA Healthy Aging Research Laboratory is partially supported by an Institutional
Development Award (IDeA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of
the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under grant number 2P20GM103395. The content
is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the official
views of Alaska INBRE.