GW was the recipient of two substantial monetary gifts in the past few days totaling almost $7 million.
M.F. “Midge” Smith will donate $1.6 million to establish the Midge Smith Center for Evaluation Effectiveness within the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy, University officials said Thursday. In addition, the GW Medical Center obtained a $5 million grant to be the national office for the Robert Wood John Foundation’s “Aligning Forces for Quality” initiative, Medical Center officials said Monday.
Smith is the founder of The Evaluators’ Institute, an organization that will now be housed at GW. The Center will partake in both the evaluation of social service programs, as well as research of the evaluation field as a whole, said Kathryn Newcomer, the Center’s co-director,
“The goal of the center is to be the premier unit in the world known for its successes in creating and facilitating use of evaluation knowledge to further effective programs in the public and nonprofit areas,” said Smith in a news release.
Smith will also be named a research professor of public policy and public administration. She was unavailable for comment.
As part of its grant agreement with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the GW Medical School will coordinate the initiative with 14 rural and urban communities nationwide. “Aligning Forces for Quality” is aimed at improving health care in ways that are equitable, patient-centered, and sustainable over time. Bruce Siegel, director of the Center for Health Care Quality within the School of Public Health and Health Services, will be the director of the new program.
“I am deeply honored to help the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in its efforts to improve the quality of health care for all Americans,” Siegel said in a news release. “This initiative will be a catalyst for change in health care. We want to be able to point to the Aligning Forces communities and say that we’ve made a difference in people’s lives.”
Aligning Forces works with care providers by measuring and publicly reporting on data about health care quality. This helps physicians and other providers learn how to improve the care given to their patients and engage them in various aspects of their own health care.
