Joan Davitt, MSS, MLSP, PhD
Assistant Professor
3701 Locust Walk, Caster Building, Room D15
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6214
215.898.1592 (phone); 215.573.2099 (fax)
jdavitt@sp2.upenn.edu
Dr. Davitt is an Assistant Professor & Hartford Geriatric Social Work Faculty Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy & Practice. She completed the Master of Social Service and Master of Law and Social Policy as well as the Ph.D. in social work from Bryn Mawr College. She has over twenty years of experience developing and administering health and long term care services as a gerontological social worker, combining advocacy, policy, and organizing work with direct practice. Dr. Davitt has worked as a long term care ombudsman, as a health promotion advocate and care manager. She has also coordinated programs organizing around the prevention of elder abuse and neglect, providing affordable housing alternatives for older adults and developing training and educational programs for long term care workers. Her current research interests include understanding the connections between policy and practice and their impact on access to care and health care outcomes for older adults, and ethical issues in long term care. Her recent research on Medicare home health care has uncovered racial disparities in access to care in the wake of the Balanced Budget Act. She has expanded this line of inquiry to investigate racial/ethnic disparities in outcomes of home care for older asults with funding from the National Institute on Aging and the Penn MARCH Center. Dr. Davitt was selected into the first cohort of scholars at the NIA funded Institute on Aging and Social Work and was recently awarded the James Zimmer New Investigator Award from the Gerontological Health section of the American Public Health Association. She has published numerous articles on health and long term care as well as the book, Current Practice in High-Tech Home Care, co-authored with Lenard Kaye, which was recently published in German. She has received research support from the Andrus Foundation, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the John A. Hartford Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation, the Institute for Urban Research, and the MARCH Center.
Curriculum Vitae (pdf) | Research
