Denise Coppa is committed to ensuring that underserved communities receive the health care they need. She supervises nurse practitioner students working at the Rhode Island Free Clinic, which serves medically uninsured patients, as well as those working at the Teens With Tots Clinic at Hasbro Children’s Hospital, where adolescent parents and their children receive primary care.

Her efforts received a boost this fall when Coppa was awarded a $1.6 million federal grant to establish academic and clinical partnerships with two community health center agencies in the state. The partnerships will improve advanced nursing practice and primary care access for medically underserved individuals by providing clinical practice sites for nurse practitioner graduate students.

“I am committed to leveraging federal grant funding to add to the primary health care workforce through the clinical education of nurse practitioner students in medically underserved communities,” she said.

Coppa calls the grant an endorsement of URI’s Nurse Practitioner Program, a graduate degree program that prepares students to provide primary care in a wide variety of health care settings. “All URI nurse practitioner students will be prepared to a high level of safe, quality, culturally fluent health care within the complex practice-based environment of the nation’s evolving health care system,” she said. “This grant project is a direct result of the Affordable Care Act, which is calling for new models that address access to primary care by underrepresented groups.”