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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Development of the 2011-2012 Board of Registered Nursing (BRN) School Survey was the work of the Board's Education Issues Workgroup, which consists of nursing education stakeholders from across California. A list of workgroup members is included in the Appendices. The University of California, San...
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This article reviews the information gathered by the National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses (NSSRN) and other sources of data on the registered nurse (RN) workforce. It examines how the data have been used to create knowledge about the RN workforce and highlights the relative strengths and...
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Providing regional projections of the RN workforce will allow underlying differences in the age structure of the RN workforce to become more visible. By providing regional-level projections, it will also be possible to identify those regions whose RN workforce is expected to grow at a slower rate...
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This research brief presents a qualitative assessment of the leadership training needs of dental directors from community health centers in California. This brief explores dental directors’ roles and responsibilities, their primary challenges as dental directors, and their perceptions of their own...
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This research brief presents a qualitative assessment of the impacts of the elimination of dental benefits for Medicaid-eligible adults in California on the oral health safety-net workforce. To understand the workforce impacts, this study examined the effects of the policy change on patient...
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Although differences in nurse staffing have been associated with individual hospital characteristics in the literature, there have been no studies on how these factors may influence nurse staffing changes made after the mandated nurse-to-patient ratios in acute care hospitals in California. The aim...
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This report explores entry-level and low-skill job opportunities that will expand due to ACA implementation. The analyses draw from estimates of future health worker demand published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and a unique analysis of the effect of the ACA on job growth developed...
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Implementation of the Affordable Care Act will stimulate demand for workers in health care services, an industry in which job growth is already strong. Preparing future entry-level employees to join the field, however, calls for establishing sectoral training strategies that align workers’ skills...
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To encourage the use of EHRs, the federal government created an incentive program for providers who demonstrate meaningful use of EHR technology. In 2011, faculty at the University of California, San Francisco, working on behalf of the California Medicaid Research Institute, developed and conducted...
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A decade after the Institute of Medicine focused national attention on quality in health care, robust resources and strategies exist to help organizations strive toward five domains of quality: safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, and efficient care. There has been much less progress in the...
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Objective To determine whether, following implementation of California’s minimum nurse staffing legislation, changes in acuity-adjusted nurse staffing and quality of care in California hospitals outpaced similar changes in hospitals in comparison states without such regulations. Data Sources/Study...
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Many conceptual models have been applied in the investigation of college retention of nursing students. We tested a model that specifies four general constructs as predictors of student success in nursing education-dispositional factors, career value factors, situational factors, and institutional...
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The termination of the National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses (NSSRN) represents a loss of a key source of information on the nursing workforce that has been available for more than 30 years. At the same time, this loss presents new opportunities to address some of the biases associated with...
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This concept paper explores the feasibility of creating opportunities for IHSS workers to play enhanced roles in providing care to their clients and to earn higher wages for fulfilling these roles. Currently there are no training requirements for personal care aides in California, and very few...
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The Clinic Leadership Institute (CLI) Emerging Leaders program helps participants become stronger leaders in community health centers throughout California. But how exactly do the learnings from a structured leadership program translate to the unpredictability and complexity of the day-to-day work...
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This article describes nurses' testimony before congressional committees between 1993 and 2011. We address three questions: (a) How have trends in nurses' testimony changed over time? (b) What do data reveal about nursing's engagement with health policy issues on the congressional agenda? (c) How...
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This report summarizes the findings of a survey conducted in spring 2012 of Chief Nursing Officers at general acute care hospitals in California, to evaluate the overall demand for RNs in the state. The survey reveals variation in the demand for RNs across California, the lack of positions...
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All low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) have health worker labour markets. Some of these countries’ markets function better than others and all can be improved. What does it mean when experts say there is a “shortage” of health workers? Is there more than one definition of a shortage and if so...
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The Institute of Medicine has called for nurses to play a greater role in oral health. Nurses often provide care for the vulnerable populations that are least likely to receive necessary, health-sustaining dental care. The link between mouth care, oral health and systemic health is well documented...
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Widely recognized problems with the U.S. health care system, including rapidly increasing costs and disparities in access and outcomes also exist in oral health. If oral health systems are to meet the "Triple Aim" of improving the experience of care, improving the health of populations, and...