Prof to join vice president, Mrs. Gore at family issues conference

A member of the UW–Madison and UW Extension faculty and about 1,000 other invited guests will help Vice President Al Gore and Mrs. Gore investigate the possibility of whole-family health care in this country.

Roberta Riportella-Muller will be an invited guest at the 1998 Family Re-Union conference at Vanderbilt University in Nashville June 22-23.

This will be the seventh Family Re-Union conference. Previous editions have dealt with such subjects as families and work, family policy, the role of men in children’s lives, media and the family, and families and learning.

According to Riportella-Muller, the Family Re-Unions are unique opportunities to examine important issues.

“The conferences provide an intersection between practice, research and policy development on issues of critical concern to families and children,” she says. Other participants will include state and local health care administrators, medical educators, senior federal officials, and representatives of hospitals, consumer groups, managed care organizations and others.

Riportella-Muller says discussion is likely to include the training of health care professionals, the impact of managed care on families and health care professionals’ response to families with a chronically ill member.

On UW–Madison’s consumer science and UW Extension faculty since 1993, Riportella-Muller has done some of the nation’s first research on barriers to health care experienced by low income populations. Her current work is examining how Medicaid patients are using managed health care.