Accelerated programs, clinical doctorates, and for-profit programs are growing trends in health professions education in California. These approaches are often cited as strategies to address workforce shortages, expand access to education, and improve quality of care. However, evidence across the three issue briefs suggests that these strategies do not consistently achieve these goals and instead present important tradeoffs. Across all three trends, a central finding emerges: no single educational model improves workforce supply, access, cost, diversity, and quality simultaneously. Instead, each approach advances some goals while potentially undermining others. In addition, the evidence base across all three areas remains limited, particularly regarding the stability of the overall workforce and patient outcomes. This summary synthesizes findings from three issue briefs to assess how these trends impact key workforce goals: supply, time to completion, access to education, cost, diversity, and geographic distribution. The three briefs are available at https://healthforce.ucsf.edu/.
