Instructors

Barbara Blechner is a Health Lawyer and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Division of Medical Humanities, Health Law, and Ethics, Department of Community Medicine and Health Care, at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. Until her recent retirement she was an Associate Professor in the Department, in the Graduate School Faculty at the University of Connecticut and a Lecturer in Law at the University of Connecticut School of Law where she headed a Health Law Clinic based at the Health Center.

Barbara teaches legal and ethical issues of health care and public health to undergraduate medical students, graduate resident physicians, physicians, health care providers, law students and graduate students in the Masters of Public Health program.

She received her A.B. degree from Barnard College with a major in Economics, M.Ed. from Goucher College as a Ford Foundation Fellow, and J.D. with honors from the University of Connecticut School of Law, after which she participated in a two-year fellowship program in Health Law and Ethics.

Barbara’s research studies in legal and ethical issues at the end of life have been
funded by Retirement Research Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Patrick and Catherine Weldon Donaghue Medical Research Foundation.

In 1992, Dr. Coll became interim director of the section of Geriatric Medicine at St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center in Hartford, Connecticut and was subsequently appointed to the position in the summer of 1993. With over $300,000 of grant support he initiated a Senior Health and Wellness program at the hospital. During this time Dr. Coll served on and then assumed chairmanship of the hospital’s ethics committee and served on the hospital’s institutional review board.

In 1997 Dr. Coll was recruited to be the director of clinical programs in geriatric medicine and associate director of the Center on Aging at the UConn Health Center. Working with the director, he undertook an expansion of clinical programs.

Dr. Coll is a member of the national faculty for the “Core Content Review of Family Medicine,” a self-administered, self-evaluation, continuing medical education program prepared under the direction of the Connecticut and Ohio Academies of Family Physicians. He has written a book chapter on “Sleep Disorders in Older Patients” and has written chapters on Myocardial Infarction, Acute Abdominal Emergencies and Mood Disorders Associated with Stroke. He has received funding on two separate occasions from the American Academy of Family Physicians Foundation, to study the utilization of mammography in older patients and the withdrawal of thyroid hormone replacement therapy in nursing home patients. He is a member of the advisory board for the Annals of Long Term Care and a reviewer for the Archives of Family Medicine.

Between 2001 and 2002, Dr. Coll was a clinical coordinator with the Connecticut Coalition to Improve End of Life Care and Qualidigm, working on their “Best Practices at the End of Life” project. This was a statewide quality improvement effort involving nine Connecticut hospitals.

Dr. Coll is a professor of Family Medicine and Medicine at the University of Connecticut Health Center and is medical director of the Seabury Retirement Community in Bloomfield, CT. He is a fellow of the American Geriatrics Society and a member of the British Geriatrics Society. He is a diplomat of the American Board of Family Practice with a certificate of added qualification in Geriatric Medicine. He is a member of the Connecticut and American Academies of Family Medicine and is listed in “The Best Doctors in America.” He has recently been honored as one of the “Best Doctors in Connecticut." Dr. Coll lives in West Hartford, CT with his wife and four children.

Charles G. Huntington, P.A, M.P.H., is the Associate Dean for Continuing and Community Education. He joined the faculty of the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in June 1996, as associate director of the Connecticut Area Health Education Center Program and assistant professor in the Department of Community Medicine and Healthcare. In 2001, he was also named program administrator for the University of Connecticut Health Center’s Connecticut Health strategic initiative. More recently, he was appointed to the UConn Center for Public Health and Health Policy and assumed the chair of the UConn Health Center’s Course and Curriculum Evaluation Committee. He is the immediate-past president of the Connecticut Public Health Association and a former president of the Unitarian Society of Hartford.

Mr. Huntington’s major academic interest is the application of family systems theory to leadership and organizational change. Prior to coming to Connecticut he spent ten years in Washington, D.C. serving as director of government relations for the American Academy of Family Physicians. He began his health care career as a physician assistant and practiced for eleven years in a rural underserved area of Upstate New York. He was an active member of the physician assistant profession and served as president of the American Academy of Physician Assistants in 1983-1984. He served as president of the National AHEC Organization in 2001-2002.

Mr. Huntington is a graduate of Williams College, completed his physician assistant training at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine, earned a master’s in public health from George Washington University, and was a Pew Health Policy Fellow at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

Iris Mauriello is a registered nurse, leading the UConn Health Center Compliance Office since 2000. She has 31 years of experience in healthcare, the majority of this time spent as a clinical R.N. and Nursing Manager in diverse settings including physical rehab, medical/surgical, psychiatric/substance abuse, emergency department, interventional radiology nursing and risk management.

Her responsibilities as Corporate Compliance Integrity/Privacy Officer include the oversight of operations for five separate domains of the University of Connecticut Health Center's Compliance Program. They are: clinical, research, administrative, finance and education. She is also the Corporate Privacy Officer, a designation required by the HIPAA Privacy regulation. As the Privacy Officer, Iris oversees the development, implementation, adherence and training related to UConn Health Center policies and procedures covering the privacy of patient protected health information in accordance with Federal and State laws.

Iris is pursuing a Bachelors Degree at the University of Connecticut with a focus in Law and Society. She is an active member of the Association of American Medical Colleges Compliance Officers Forum, the Health Care Compliance Association and is past chairperson of the Connecticut Hospital Association Corporate Compliance Officers Group. She also holds a certification in Health Care Compliance (CHC) awarded by the Health Care Compliance Association Board.

Alberta Richetelle has been the program director of Healthnet: Connecticut Consumer Health Information Network at the Lyman Maynard Stowe Library, UConn Health Center since 1985. Healthnet is an outreach program to Connecticut’s public libraries to help make health information more accessible to residents of the state.

Ms. Richetelle has taught numerous classes and workshops in consumer health information to librarians and the public, and has been an invited speaker on consumer health issues and topics at national and regional conferences. Her education includes a Master of Science Degree in library science and a Master of Science in therapeutic recreation from the University of Illinois and a Master of Public Health degree from Yale University.

While primarily an administrator, Dr. Scott Wetstone finds any excuse he can to get into the classroom and teach about epidemiology, biostatistics, medical decision making and evidence-based medicine as well as how to critically appraise research articles in the literature.

His audiences range from high school seniors to senior citizens but mostly address the needs of medical and dental students, physicians in practice, and students in the Masters in Public Health Program.

In addition to teaching locally, Dr. Wetstone routinely teaches in hospitals in the southern part of the state and has gone as far to teach as India. His research interests include physician and patient education by computer and distance learning approaches.

These experiences have helped him in his most important formal teaching roles as a Cub Scout leader and a religious school teacher.