Nancy Swanger is the Founding Director of the Granger Cobb Institute for Senior Living (United States of America). She led the creation of the Institute to honour the memory of Granger Cobb, himself a pioneer in advancing senior living. Under Nancy Swanger’s leadership, the Institute has created major educational programs to address staffing shortages and improve skills in the provision of long-term care. In short, Nancy Swanger’s work through the Granger Cobb Institute has established an educational ecosystem dedicated to raising the quantity and quality of caregivers globally.
The four major components of Nancy Swanger’s work to educate future caregivers through the Granger Cobb Institute include the Granger Cobb Institute for Senior Living Scholars who are financially supported to work on solutions for the most pressing problems in contemporary caregiving, a fully online Professional Certificate Program, a Four-year interdisciplinary Bachelor’s Degree, and a team of Faculty Fellows employed to conduct research and curriculum development that continues to advance the profession. Taken together, these four pillars function to create the educational foundations for training ever increasing generations of carers and healthy ageing advocates.
A central issue in transforming the way we provide long-term care to all older people who need it is the lack of trained personnel to actually provide the care. Of course, innovations can also be made in the actual models of care provision to introduce efficiencies in human resourcing while remaining responsive to the needs of older people. But Nancy Swanger’s leadership and innovation in creating replicable models of training caregivers and advocating for the importance of the caregiving profession are equally inspiring exemplars that demonstrate that it is indeed possible to ensure access to long-term care for all older people who require it, if we think beyond the usual ways of doing business.