Health | Education | Diversity | Arts | Neighborhoods | Employee Volunteering in Connecticut | Hartford Health Disparities Collaborative

Improving the Health of Connecticut's Communities
Aetna's partnerships with the state's nonprofits have included a community-wide collaborative effort that helped significantly improve on-time immunization rates for Hartford's children; the Aetna Foundation Children's Center, created with St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center, to help prevent and treat child abuse; and the Child Health Data Center funded by the Aetna Foundation at Connecticut Children's Medical Center (CCMC), which provides state and nonprofit organizations with crucial child health information.

Easing Trauma and Suffering
Aetna led a fundraising effort to help Hartford Hospital extend the reach of specialized palliative and end-of-life care its patients and their families receive. We also are partnering with the hospital and the American Trauma Society to build a best-practice model for end-of-life care in a trauma setting.

Keeping Kids Healthy and Learning
The Aetna Foundation was proud to provide $85,000 to establish health clinics at Hartford's Weaver and Bulkeley high schools, which provides students with crucial health services during school hours. A major grant of $250,000 to the CCMC is helping expand its Easy Breathing childhood asthma program, which has become a national model for asthma care and prevention. Aetna marked its 150th anniversary with a series of activities, one of which was a lead role in helping the CCMC raise nearly $300,000 to expand its pediatric intensive care unit.

Raising Awareness of Health Risks
In 2007, Aetna announced their continued support of  the American Heart Association's Go Red For Women Luncheon. Aetna’s $50,000 sponsorship will continue to support the organization’s campaign to raise awareness about heart disease, the nation’s number one cause of death among women. The Luncheon similarly focuses on raising awareness and funds for life saving research & education that are women-specific initiatives of the American Heart Association.

Building Diversity in Health Professions
The Aetna Foundation has made a $2 million commitment to endow the Aetna Health Professions Partnership Initiative at the UConn Health Center. This initiative builds interest in health professions among disadvantaged students from middle school through college. In addition, retired Aetna executive chairman Dr. John W. Rowe, current chairman of the UConn Board of Trustees, and his wife, Valerie, made a $1.5 million personal contribution to establish a program to enrich the academic experience for honor students pursuing health profession-related majors at UConn.

Reducing Hartford Health Disparities
In February 2004, the Aetna Foundation convened a community forum to discuss racial and ethnic health disparities among Hartford's citizens. The forum's efforts led to the creation of an alliance of funders, health care providers, and community partners - called the Hartford Health Disparities Collaborative (HHDC) - which is helping to address these disparities through cooperative initiatives, shared information, and increased awareness among policy leaders and citizens.

As a first major step, the HHDC is supporting Mayor Eddie Perez's Healthy Communities Initiative, an unprecedented collaborative effort that is creating a community-wide health care system for Hartford's uninsured population.

In conjunction with this effort, the Aetna Foundation awarded a grant to the Connecticut Policy and Economic Council to build integrated databases and maps of Hartford healthcare providers - a tool to help identify factors impacting health disparities in the city.