At Healthforce Center, our research on the health care workforce offers timely analysis and guidance for providers, policymakers and funders in addressing critical delivery and improvement challenges. We have a team of nationally recognized research experts who work to define issues and support health policy change with rigorous analysis, high-quality data and actionable recommendations.
Our expertise covers the entire health workforce — the full range of licensed professions, credentialed occupations, and emerging roles such as community health workers and peer providers, and across all types of settings from acute to long-term care. We specialize in examining evolving trends in care models, care team composition, and promising new models for the delivery of high-quality health care.
Committed to Improving Health Equity
Our commitment to improving health equity and ensuring a diverse health workforce translates into research that emphasizes expanding cultural competence and language concordance, promoting workforce diversity through education and development programs, and evaluating care models that ensure health equity.
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American health care is experiencing fundamental change. What was recently conceived as a set of policy changes for reform is now being lent the form and weight of institutional reality by the enormous power of the trillion-dollar health care market. In five brief years the organizational,...
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Current physician workforce trends indicate a need to reform federal graduate medical education (GME) policy to better align policy with market signals and the public interest. The transformation of health care is affecting other health professions as well, but in no other case are the gaps between...
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The biomedical model has formed the foundation and defined the character of contemporary American medical practice and education. There is a growing perception, however, that the biomedical model cannot fully reflect the broad clinical realities of modern health care and that practitioners must...
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As the country strives to produce larger numbers of generalist physicians, considerable controversy has arisen over whether or not generalist applicants can be identified, recruited, and influenced to keep a generalist-oriented commitment throughout medical training. The authors present new and...
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For several decades, researchers, policy analysts and consumer advocates have consistently found that the care provided by midwives differs from the medical model of care in ways that benefit women and their families in terms of quality, satisfaction and costs. In early 1998 a Taskforce on...
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Affirmative action has been used by institutions and individuals in the United States since the 1960s to increase the participation of women and racial and ethnic minorities in employment, contracting and higher education. This report utilizes a broad perspective to review the data and research...
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The patient surges due to COVID-19 require rapid training and deployment of the existing health workforce, innovative and creative methods to increase the skills and types of individuals providing care on the frontlines, and the launch of alternative care settings. This page provides...
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The California Health Care Foundation's (CHCF) Health Care Leadership Program helps to transform today’s clinicians into tomorrow’s leaders. Up to 32 physicians, behavioral health providers, nurses, dentists, pharmacists, and other health care professionals are selected annually for this two-year,...
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As the United States continues to experience growth in the population older adults, there is an urgent need to improve care for individuals living in the community with chronic and serious illness. Numerous analyses and health care leaders have identified the lack of an adequately-prepared...
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Health care in California and in the nation requires an adequate supply of well-prepared professional nurses. Complex demographic, economic, and political factors influence changes in the demand for nurses. The Healthforce Center has collaborated with the Hospital Association of Southern California...
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As the nation seeks to improve access to primary care services, medical assistants (MAs) will be a critical component of that growth. Medical assisting is one of the fastest growing occupations in the country with large numbers of annual job openings. Historically, MA training has been of...
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Greater reliance on nurse practitioners (NPs) has been widely recognized as a critical component to the successful implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In particular, NPs are viewed integral to the delivery of primary care services, demand for which is expected to increase as more...
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Support at Home (S@H) is a pilot program of the San Francisco Department of Aging and Adult Services to provide home care vouchers to keep San Francisco adults with disabilities and seniors living safely in the community. The goal of Support at Home is to serve individuals who are not eligible for...
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Peer providers are individuals with lived experience who are hired to provide direct support to persons in recovery from mental health (MH) and/or substance use disorders (SUD). These workers are increasingly being used to support transitions of care from inpatient mental health and substance abuse...
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When was the last time your primary care clinician asked you about your teeth? Oral health is central to overall health in a way that is not commonly understood or supported by a model of primary care in the United States that carves out dentistry. Yet oral health problems can lead to heart and...
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Safety-net providers often report challenges recruiting and retaining staff, particularly for high-cost, high-demand professions such as registered nurses and physicians. Rural providers face greater difficulty due to the relatively lower supply of health professionals in rural communities, and...
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This three-year effort will evaluate a language access systems intervention (LASI) and test evidence-guided and patient-centered interventions to reduce disparities for Chinese- and Spanish-speaking patients who have limited English proficiency.
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UCSF has conducted studies of the supply, education, and other aspects of California’s nursing workforce for the California Board of Registered Nursing since 2005. Every two years, Healthforce researchers conduct the Survey of Registered Nurses, which provides detailed information about nurse...
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Alzheimer's disease (AD) and AD-related dementia (ADRD) is a profoundly debilitating disease with risk increasing with age (Alzheimer's Foundation of America, 2016). This disease will quickly burden a growing percentage of Americans and pose a great challenge for the U.S. health care system. Adult...
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Dental caries, and its resulting cavities, is the most common disease of childhood, causing significant costs to individuals and society. Disparities in oral health status, access to services, and utilization of dental care for the Medicaid-enrolled pediatric population have been well documented...