Nashville VA researcher earns top award for excellence in health care education

The Worthen Award recognizes exceptional VA health care champions for their contributions to enhancing health professions trainee education.
 
The award is bestowed in three categories: the Rising Star Award, the Innovator Award, and the Career Achievement Award, which recognizes an outstanding health professions education champion whose lifetime contributions have profoundly advanced and impacted the education mission of VA health care.
 
Dittus serves as the Geriatric Research, Education and Clinical Center Director and Quality Scholars Fellowship Training Program Director at TVHS.
 
He received the Worthen Career Achievement Award for developing and leading innovative research and quality improvement training programs for the past 40 years while mentoring 137 interprofessional fellows and junior faculty. Dittus developed an innovative curricular design for research training that has been adopted broadly. He is a founding director and senior scholar who pioneered the VA Nashville Quality Scholars program, in which he mentored 71 fellows whose projects have made substantive improvements to the effectiveness and efficiency of VA health care.
 
“This year’s awardees have made significant contributions to training the next generation of health care professionals,” said Marjorie A. Bowman, MD, MPA, VA Chief of Academic Affiliations. “Each of these recipients embody the characteristics of excellence that make VA a national leader in health professions education, and we congratulate them for their achievements.”

VHA is the nation’s largest education and training program for health professionals in the U.S., working in partnership with 96% of the country’s medical schools and more than 1,500 universities and colleges, including associated health professions schools. Each year, 120,000 trainees in more than 60 clinical health professions education programs complete training in a VA facility.

VA Tennessee Valley Healthcare System is an integrated tertiary health care system comprised of two hospitals, the Alvin C. York Campus in Murfreesboro and the Nashville Campus, as well as more than a dozen community-based outpatient clinics located in Tennessee and Kentucky. TVHS provides ambulatory care, primary care, and secondary care in acute medicine and surgery, specialized tertiary care, transplant services, spinal cord injury outpatient care, and a full range of extended care and mental health services.

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