By Sunita Mutha, MD, FACP, Director of 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 extra time to review where we've been and where we are going.

Reprinted with permission by Monterey County Now.

By Sara Rubin

By Rebecca Wolfson

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.

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.

“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 Healthforce Center at UCSF, a leading source for actionable research insights into the health care workforce. 

Story source: CalMatters

By Janet Coffman, Healthforce and Alicia Fernández, Special to CalMatters

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.

On September 18, Dr. Mitch Katz, President and CEO, NYC Health + Hospitals, shared with California Improvement Network (CIN) partners at the fall CIN partner meeting about his experience leading the largest public health care system in the United States as it became the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020.

California is providing debt relief for doctors and dentists who agree to accept Medi-Cal. The grant has lifted “an emotional burden,” one recipient said in The New York Times, adding, “I can focus on my patients.”

One in five adults experience mental illness in a given year, and mental health conditions are exacerbated among minority groups. For example, the rate of depression among black youth is 30% higher than the average for their age group. Multiracial US adults are more likely to experience mental illness than adults who identify as any single race. Lesbian, gay and bisexual adults are twice as likely as heterosexual adults to experience a mental illness, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Healthforce Center at UCSF Director Sunita Mutha, MD, FACP, was featured in the UCSF Office of Research series, "Researcher of the Month." The article highlights Healthforce Center's role as the leading research organization producing information and evidence to understand the health care workforce.

By Shelley Wong