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.
Search our Resources
-
Retail clinics have the potential to reduce health spending by offering convenient, low-cost access to basic health care services. Retail clinics are often staffed by nurse practitioners (NPs), whose services are regulated by state scope-of-practice regulations. By limiting NPs’ work scope,...
-
The health care industry has been an engine of job growth, and the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) is expected to stimulate further growth. Over the next decade, the health care sector could add 4.6 million jobs, representing a 31% increase from current employment. New job opportunities...
-
Multiple data sources were analyzed to provide detailed information about the diversity of California’s registered nurse workforce and to develop projections of future diversity.
-
The biennial California Survey of Registered Nurses provides information about the demographics, education, and employment of registered nurses in the state.
-
This summary covers current (as of Sept 2013) scope of practice for medical assistants (MAs) in the state of California. In California, MAs are unlicensed personnel who work in physician (MD), podiatrist (DPM), or optometrist (OD) offices; and clinics. MAs may not work for inpatient care in...
-
Objective A registered nurse (RN) license can be obtained by completing a baccalaureate degree (BSN), an associate degree (AD), or a diploma program. The aim of this article is to examine the return to baccalaureate education from the perspective of the nurse. Data Sources National Sample...
-
This article explains the process used to identify and develop a set of data used to track national progress toward the recommendations of the Institute of Medicine Committee for the Future of Nursing. The data are presented in a dashboard format to visually summarize information and quickly...
-
This study tests whether changes in licensed nurse staffing led to changes in patient safety, using the natural experiment of 2004 California implementation of minimum staffing ratios. We calculated counts of six patient safety outcomes from California Patient Discharge Data from 2000 through 2006...
-
There is an ongoing debate about the reasons for the growth of temporary employment of registered nurses (RNs). Some argue that efficiency incentives to increase flexibility and reduce labor costs are the principal cause, while others point to shortages of RNs as the stronger determinant. Using...
-
School-based health centers (SBHCs) are an important component of health care reform. The SBHC model of care offers accessible, continuous, comprehensive, family-centered, coordinated, and compassionate care to infants, children, and adolescents. These same elements comprise the patient-centered...
-
California’s community health centers face numerous challenges amidst a vast, complex and rapidly evolving healthcare landscape. Chief among these challenges is the need to adapt to changes in the healthcare system resulting from the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and remain solvent and...
-
This report presents supply and demand forecasts for the Registered Nurse (RN) workforce in California from 2013 through 2030. These new forecasts are based on data from the 2012 California Board of Registered Nursing (BRN) Survey of Registered Nurses, the U.S. Bureau of Health Professions (BHPr)...
-
The Greater Bay Area Mental Health & Education Workforce Collaborative (the Collaborative), is a regional partnership of mental health providers, educators, advocacy and consumer groups, and other stakeholders who are engaged in a collaborative process to improve the mental health workforce in...
-
Sources related to demand for nurses data are more difficult to find, and also more difficult to interpret relative to supply. When people talk about the "demand" for nurses, they can have multiple concepts in mind. Even if the concept is well-defined, the data may not clearly align with the...
-
Despite the importance of the internationally educated nurse (IEN) workforce, there has been little research on the employment settings of IENs and other aspects of their employment. We analyzed data from the 2008 National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses to characterize IENs in the United States...
-
With increased economic pressures on hospitals, limitations on resident physician hours, and payment reductions for preventable harms, hospitals seek to increase productivity while improving the quality of patient care. Frequently, relative value units and patient encounters are used to track...
-
The University of California, San Francisco School of Dentistry established the Dental Postbaccalaureate Program in 1998 to provide reapplication assistance to students from economically and/or educationally disadvantaged backgrounds who were previously denied admission to dental school. The goals...
-
The foundation of the health care delivery system is its workforce, including the 2.8 million registered nurses (RNs) who provide health care services in countless settings. The importance of RNs is expected to increase in the coming decades, as new models of care delivery, global payment, and a...
-
The demographics of Marin County, California are changing. One of the most dramatic examples is the increase in the number of older adults. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of people over 60 years old living in Marin grew significantly, from 44,000 to 61,000, making this group 24% of the county’s...
-
This brief provides an overview of the CHCF Health Care Leadership Program and a summary of results from an assessment of the process and impact of a key component of the program, the California Health Improvement Project (CHIP). CHIPs are leadership projects undertaken by program participants at...