Funding is available from the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation for community partners to build programs to help families and caregivers of older adults.

Most frail older adults are cared for by family, friends and other nonprofessionals. With this funding initiative, the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation will help community partnerships develop innovative ways to support these devoted caregivers.

AVAILABLE GRANTS

Up to $9 million over three years through the Family and Informal Caregiver Support Program will support from 12 to 20 community-based Projects with grants ranging from $100,000 to $300,000 per year (for a total of $300,000 to $900,000 for each grant recipient from March 2009 through February 2012).

ELIGIBLE APPLICANTS

The Foundation encourages non-profit 501(c)(3) organizations, including aging and human service agencies, faith-based and other community-based organizations, tribal organizations, and units of local government to participate.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION

http://www.hjweinbergfoundation.org/subPages/grantmaking/rfp.htm
CaregivingRFP@theweinbergfoundation.org

The Lance Armstrong Foundation (LAF) recently announced that they are collaborating with the American Library Association (ALA) to provide libraries across the country with reference materials to better serve those seeking health-related information, specifically cancer. Recently, the LAF began shipping LIVESTRONG Survivorship Notebooks to more than 14,200 libraries across the United States.

The LAF created the LIVESTRONG Survivorship Notebook to give cancer information access to everyone, especially low-income or uninsured citizens who do not have access to a computer or are denied follow-up care after completing cancer treatment. (more…)

Tox Town: Nuevo recurso en español de la Biblioteca Nacional de Medicina

Tox Town is now available in both English, http://toxtown.nlm.nih.gov and en español, http://toxtown.nlm.nih.gov/espanol. Visitors can learn in English or in Spanish about environmental health concerns and over 30 toxic chemicals in these imaginary neighborhoods: a City, Farm, Town, US-Mexico Border, and Port.

In either language, Tox Town uses neighborhood scenes along with color, graphics, sounds, and animation to add interest to learning about connections between chemicals, the environment, and the public’s health. Tox Town’s target audience is high school, college and graduate students, educators, and the interested public.

Tox Town en español identifies Spanish-language information in a subject area – environmental health and toxicology – that currently has few Web resources. To supplement the limited Web resources in Spanish, nearly 100 pages of background information describing environmental health concerns were translated and reviewed by a team of bilingual health information specialists.

Tox Town is ideal for supplementing classes in environmental science, earth science, forensics, and health. Also, students learning to read either English or Spanish may use Tox Town to improve language skills as they toggle back and forth between the Spanish and English text.

Tox Town joins three other Spanish-language Web resources from the National Library of Medicine. ToxMystery, for grades 2–6, features a bilingual talking cat that teaches about possible chemical hazards around the home, http://toxmystery.nlm.nih.gov. MedlinePlus (en español at http://medlineplus.gov/spanish) directs users to hundreds of Spanish-language resources on health including drug information, news stories and interactive tutorials that read aloud in Spanish or in English. The AIDSinfo Web site, home for treatment guidelines, drug information and clinical trials related to HIV/AIDS, also has a Spanish version, infoSIDA, available at http://aidsinfo.nih.gov/infoSIDA.

Tox Town® is a project of the Specialized Information Services Division of the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. Promotional materials and Tox Town images for Web sites and publications are listed at http://toxtown.nlm.nih.gov/clipart.html. Please send your comments or questions on Tox Town to tehip@teh.nlm.nih.gov.

Central Texas counties can now access a directory to local health resources through Heart of Texas Go Local!

Heart of Texas Go Local connects health services in the heart of Texas (a twenty-two county region in central Texas including Austin, Bryan/College Station, Waco and Temple/Killeen) to health topics on MedlinePlus, the National Library of Medicine’s health information portal. Texas A&M University Medical Sciences Library is responsible for the project, under the leadership of Becky McKay. Working with Becky to make the site happen have been Cindy Sharp, Gauri Govil, Elizabeth Kaster and Mellisa Tomlin. Thanks are also due to library director Esther Carrigan, and Chris Foster.

Heart of Texas Go Local is a joint project between the Texas A&M University Medical Sciences Library and the National Library of Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Check out http://www.medlineplus.gov/hot

Congratulations to Texas A&M University Medical Sciences Library!

The American Library Association (ALA) is pleased to announce that it is working with WGBH Boston on the upcoming national outreach campaign for the film “The Truth About Cancer,” which will air on PBS at 9 p.m. on April 16 (check local listings). The 90-minute documentary film, followed by a 30-minute expert panel hosted by news journalist and cancer survivor Linda Ellerbee, will be the launching pad for events and projects across the country focused on creating community conversations around cancer survivorship.

ALA and WGBH encourage libraries to reach out to their local PBS stations to collaborate with them on events surrounding this film. To assist in these outreach efforts, WGBH will offer extensive online resources, including downloadable handouts, which will be available at http://www.pbs.org/takeonestep starting in March 2008. In addition, a limited number of free Outreach Toolkits, including two event posters and a DVD Screener that will include 30 minutes of the film and the full expert panel, is available to libraries that request them. WGBH asks that libraries not hold public screenings using the DVD screener until one week prior to the premiere broadcast.

To order the Outreach Toolkit, please go to: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/takeonestep/request.html. Materials are limited and are available on a first-come, first-serve basis.

For more information, view the ALA Press Release at: http://www.ala.org/ala/pressreleases2008/february2008/outreach08.htm.

Trainers are invited to download ready-made educational materials for training responders on the usage of WISER. In addition to a module that provides an introduction to WISER, scenario-based presentations are available so a training unit can be built which meets the needs, interests, and time constraints of your department or organization.

For more details, please see the http://wiser.nlm.nih.gov/training.html

The Community-Campus Partnerships for Health (CCPH) Award recognizes exemplary partnerships between communities and higher educational institutions that build on each other’s strengths to improve higher education, civic engagement, and the overall health of communities.

The intent of the CCPH Award is to highlight the power and potential of community-campus partnerships. Through the CCPH Award we seek to recognize community-campus partnerships that:

* Others can aspire to
* Embody the CCPH principles (http://depts.washington.edu/ccph/principles.html#principles)
* Pursue multiple community-campus partnership strategies
* Involve a full range of partners
* Achieve significant outcomes that go beyond a process or a single event

CALL FOR NOMINATIONS

Nominations for the 2008 CCPH Annual Award are due February 12, 2008. Click here for the Call for Nominations: http://depts.washington.edu/ccph/pdf_files/Award08guidelinesf.pdf

For more information: http://depts.washington.edu/ccph/awards.html#NominationGuidelines

This is a reminder that the NN/LM SCR Spring Cycle Award applications are due Friday, 1 February 2008.

The following awards are available:
· Course Development Award
· DOCLINE Library Improvement Project Award
· Express Outreach Award
· Mobile Health Education Project Award
· Regional Symposium Award

We hope you will consider applying!  Please let the award manager, or me, know if you have questions regarding these funding opportunities.

The Medical Library Association (MLA), under contract and working with the National Institutes of Health/National Library of Medicine (NLM), is looking for eight hospital-based libraries to pilot a new Health Information Literacy (HIL) Curriculum designed to increase health care provider knowledge of health information literacy issues, increase patient and provider use of NLM and other consumer resources, and promote the role of librarians as key providers of health information literacy resources and support.

To become a pilot site, the hospital-based library can be of any size and type, and serve any geographic area. Interested libraries must submit an application form and letter of commitment from their hospital administration documenting organizational commitment to long-term delivery of consumer health information services, via email by January 7, 2008 to Sabrina Kurtz-Rossi, Project Coordinator at sabrina_kurtz-rossi@comcast.net. See the Pilot Training Selection Criteria document for a description of the selection criteria, training site expectations, and the support that training sites will receive from the project.

All applicants will be notified of their selection status by January 30, 2008. If you have any questions about this call for pilot training sites, please contact Ms. Kurtz-Rossi via email.

Adapted from the original press release: http://www.mlanet.org/resources/healthlit/hil_pilot.html

Congratulations to Jeffrey Huber at the Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center (HAM-TMC) Library, the recipient of the 2007-2008 Access to Electronic Consumer Health Information Award! The project, South Central Houston Community Health Information Center, will facilitate access to electronic consumer health information at the South Central Houston Community Health Center’s Riverside Clinic facility, a location which provides preventive and primary care services to medically underserved communities in the southeast area of Houston.

This will be a collaborative project between the HAM-TMC Library and the South Central Houston Community Health Center. The goal of the program is to create an Internet-connected health information center with ten workstations at the Riverside Clinic facility and to provide training regarding use of electronic health information resources to both clinic staff members and clinic clientele.