As we dive into 2025, the Policy at Healthforce team is providing an update on what we learned through the open community workshops held last fall, and how participant feedback is informing our current projects. The collective goal of these efforts is to influence policy changes in California to promote better access to care and improved health outcomes through greater health workforce diversity and expanded economic opportunities for communities.

Policy at Healthforce relies on a community-driven and collaborative approach to transforming the health workforce. During the interactive design workshops, we proposed three focus areas for the coming year and guided more than 100 participants, representing diverse interests and perspectives (see word cloud for how participants identified their priorities), through exercises to refine and improve each project and policy area. Below we have summarized feedback from workshop participants and how this input is shaping the work we are pursuing.

It’s important to note that these priorities and projects were developed and finalized in late 2024. One of the core commitments of Policy at Healthforce is a community-informed research and policy agenda that is dynamic and responsive. As the changing and uncertain federal policy landscape unfolds in 2025, we will continue to assess priorities and use dedicated resources for emerging and responsive projects.

Focus area 1: Health workforce data toolkit

We heard loud and clear the desire to develop data-driven approaches to building a more robust, diverse, and inclusive health workforce, but lack of access to the data you need and better tools for using the data are major barriers. In partnership with Health Career Connection (HCC), we are developing a health workforce data toolkit that regional workforce collaboratives and other stakeholders invested in health workforce development can use to build consensus and prioritize health workforce needs and programming. You can view our first joint webinar with HCC summarizing our inventory of health workforce data and its attributes. The toolkit is in progress with ongoing feedback through HCC, and we will continue to focus on ensuring access to actionable health workforce data in future efforts. 

Focus area 2: Impact of generative artificial intelligence (AI) on the health workforce

Of the two areas we proposed to focus on within the topic of AI, most people voted for the use of AI in the workplace over its use in education and training; however, many folks needed more foundational and digestible products to better understand the current landscape of AI and how its deployment impacts the health workforce. To help us all stay updated on new developments, we are creating two resources: (1) a primer on the current use of AI in the workplace and how it affects health workers, and (2) a longer annotated bibliography of how AI applies to health workers with implications for policies to support equitable implementation in the workplace. We expect these foundational products to help us identify other ways in which our team can generate evidence and policy recommendations around the use of AI. 

Focus area 3: Issue briefs

We presented several ideas for issue brief topics and people voted on which would be most useful. The top ideas centered around two themes: (1) creating and sustaining high-quality jobs to support staff retention, and (2) identifying the policies and programs that effectively improve health workforce diversity – a key lever for improving health outcomes. Our team is working to produce issue briefs that synthesize existing information across these themes to support advocacy and policy solutions.

We will continue to work in the areas above while also reserving resources to tackle projects in response to emerging needs in a dynamic policy landscape. Much more is to come in 2025, but for now, we are grateful for your ongoing engagement and input. As always, we welcome your feedback via email to [email protected] or through this short form.