How to Increase Diversity in the Health Care Workforce Now

Photo: From the left: Maryam Alehashem, postdoctoral scholar, Berliza Soriano, doctoral student, and principal investigator Allison Williams, PhD, assistant professor at the UCSF School of Medicine, in the all-women, racially and culturally diverse Williams Lab, in Genentech Hall, at the UCSF...

Webinar: Enabling Dental Therapy Practice to Improve Access to Oral Health Services

For two decades, the US Surgeon General has highlighted large gaps in access to oral care and the “silent epidemic” of dental disease. More than 30% of the US population has difficulty accessing care. This has resulted in a call to action to increase workforce diversity, capacity, and flexibility...

COVID-19 Is Reshaping California’s Health Workforce

Evidence is mounting that American health care workers are quitting in large numbers. The health care sector has lost nearly half a million workers (PDF) since February 2020, and new data suggest that during the pandemic 18% of health care workers have quit and 12% have been laid off.

A Retrospective of 2021 Progress at Healthforce Center

If 2020 was the year of a collective reckoning on racial injustice across the nation, then 2021 was the year of laser-like focus on how to redouble our efforts to advance equity and become more anti-racist. As Healthforce Center at UCSF will celebrate our 30th anniversary in 2022, we are taking...

Well-Being Strategies for the Health Care Workforce

Health systems are uniquely positioned to advance health equity by ensuring that their own workers are well, supported, and equipped to deliver high-quality care. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how work environments in health systems affect the well-being of workers, whose capacity to deliver safe...

Dr. Elizabeth Mertz to Lead Research at Healthforce Center at UCSF

Healthforce Center at UCSF is excited to announce that Dr. Elizabeth Mertz has been appointed Associate Director of Research to succeed Dr. Joanne Spetz. In this role, Mertz will be responsible for developing new research opportunities and cultivating faculty connections.

California Faces Short-Term Nursing Shortage from COVID-19 Retirements

California will face a significant shortfall of registered nurses over the next five years due to long-term trends that have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report by the UCSF Health Workforce Research Center on Long-Term Care.

A New Effort to Train Health Workers Reimagines Health Care

Orlando Elizondo has spent a lot of time thinking about how health care is delivered – not in doctor’s offices or emergency rooms, but in the streets, at your front door, at church. He is a consultant whose clients include UC San Francisco, where a years-long effort at the Healthforce Center has...

How COVID-19 Has Impacted the Nursing Workforce

“Whenever somebody says, I think we have a nursing shortage, I think the answer we should all provide to that is, what do you mean by shortage? And where is it happening? It's really almost the beginning of the question, not the answer,” said Dr. Joanne Spetz, associate director of research at...

OpEd: COVID-19 Reveals Need to Increase Diversity Among California Physicians

COVID-19 has revealed serious flaws in our health system, but none is more distressing than the deep racial and ethnic inequality exposed by the pandemic. With Latinx and Black people dying at higher rates than the rest of the population, communities of color are much more likely than other groups...