Area Health Education Center

A Successful Story with a National Scope

In 1971, the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education issued a landmark report entitled, "Higher Education and the Nation's Health", advocating educational incentives and regionalized training programs to address the specialty and geographic maldistribution of health professionals in urban and rural regions of the country. Based upon the Carnegie Commission's recommendations, Congress established the national Area Health Education Center (AHEC) program the following year.

AHEC Mission

The AHEC mission is to improve accessibility to quality health care services by providing continuing education and training to health care professionals and trainees and health promotion and disease prevention messaging to medically underserved communities.

The goals of the AHEC program are to

• Provide a direct link between academic health institutions and medically underserved rural and urban communities
  
  
• Recruit health profession trainees for practice in medically undeserved areas
  
  
• Coordinate continuing education programs for health care professionals
  
  
• Promote health profession training experiences in medically underserved, community settings
  
  
• Enhance consumer awareness of health, wellness and disease prevention through culturally competent health promotion activities.