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.
- BACKGROUND: Investigators have used a variety of operational definitions of nursing hours of care in measuring nurse staffing for health services research. However, little is known about which approach is best for nurse staffing measurement. OBJECTIVE: To examine whether various nursing hours...
- Community colleges in California play an important role in providing accessible degree and non-degree education and training programs for a range of nursing and allied health professions. Certified nursing assisting (CNA) is one such non-degree program offered in community colleges across the State...
- Effective health workforce planning requires a basic understanding about the supply and demand for health workers. This webinar presents strategies used in three states—Florida, New York, and California—to monitor demand for health workers using employer surveys. Full Publication
- During the spring and summer of 2013, some 61 stakeholders—including 52 parents of children with special heath care needs and nine providers and policymakers—were systematically interviewed for their responses to and reflections on six ethnographic models produced for the Lucile Packard Foundation...
- The forces at play in today's health care environment are unprecedented. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), with its yet-to-be-defined impact on care deliver, the recent passage of California Senate Bill 493 (SB 493), and the "triple aim" goal to deliver better care to more people at a lower cost, are...
- OBJECTIVES: To characterize availability of electronic health records (EHRs) at the primary practice locations of certified nurse midwives (CNMs), nurse practitioners (NPs), and physicians in California prior to the implementation of the state's Medicaid EHR incentive program. STUDY DESIGN AND...
- The number of children eligible for Medicaid dental coverage in California will increase to nearly 5 million because of the Affordable Care Act the transition of nearly 880,000 children from California's Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to Medicaid. This study assesses the dental capacity...
- This report highlights seven “leader states” in training standards for Medicaid-funded personal care aides (PCAs). Although our previous research has demonstrated a paucity of standards in most states, a few have engaged in a rational approach to designing PCA training standards with the goal of...
- The Central Massachusetts Community Health Center Partnership (CMCHCP) is a collaborative effort of employers and training centers intended to address the workforce needs of Worcester-area community health centers. The partnership’s first project focuses on training incumbent and new medical...
- Report on findings from a 2013 survey of a sample of California physicians regarding their participation in Medi-Cal (California's Medicaid program) the eve of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
- This report summarizes the findings from a survey of general acute care (GAC) hospital employers of registered nurses (RNs) in California, conducted in fall 2013. This is the fourth annual survey of hospital RN employers; together these surveys provide an opportunity to evaluate overall demand for...
- The growth of for-profit postsecondary institutions in the US has been the focus of several national studies, media reports, and legislative activity in recent years. Concerns have been raised about the role these schools – especially two-year, private colleges – play in training the country’s...
- This issue brief explores two related phenomena: growth in the number of non-White students pursuing health professions-related education, and the role played by private for-profit institutions play in their training. Growth in the number of healthcare-related degrees and certificates is associated...
- Current data suggest that segments of California’s mental health care workforce are becoming more racially and ethnically diverse. The psychology profession continues to be a predominantly White workforce, but counselors and social workers are more reflective of California’s diverse population....
- Objectives: Direct access is a term that describes the ability of patients to seek health care from midlevel dental providers (MLDPs) without first seeing a dentist. The objective of this study was to synthesize the evidence for the effects and costs of direct access to MLDPs in a primary dental...
- California registered nurses were surveyed to learn their experiences with obtaining post-licensure education, and their interest in pursuing additional education.
- Editorial accompanying an article on an audit study of physicians' acceptance of new patients with Medicaid and private health insurance. Full Publication
- Oral health is directly related to systemic health, yet many Americans have limited to no access to dental health professionals. Nurse practitioners are in an excellent position to fill this void by providing caries risk assessments, chemical therapy to prevent progression of caries, and...
- In response to Manthous, we discuss the role of unions in health care. The ethical quandary that Manthous perceives in health care worker unions is overstated because patient and worker interests are frequently aligned. The search for a "selfless" union overlooks the importance of adequate...
- UCSF researchers find that medical laboratory technicians (MLTs) are being integrated into laboratory staff at California hospitals with good results. This one-page document provides a summary of the full report and offers recommendations for more fully tapping MLT potential.
- The impact of health information technology (HIT) in hospitals is dependent in large part on how it is used by nurses. This study examines the impact of HIT on the quality of care in hospitals in the Veterans Health Administration (VA), focusing on nurse-sensitive outcomes from 1995 to 2005. Full...
- Development of the 2012-2013 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...
- Center Researchers Beth Mertz and Cynthia Wides published this article in the February 2014 Supplemental Issue of the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved. This issue celebrates the 25th year of the journal's publication and focuses on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act....
- In 2005 the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) implemented the Scientific Leadership and Management (SLM) course, a 2-day leadership training program to assist laboratory-based postdoctoral scholars in their transition to independent researchers managing their own research programs. In...
- This is a complex question to answer, but recent work published by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies tries to quantify the effect of the ACA. The report by Frogner and Spetz (2013) shows about one-third of the projected increase in RN demand will be derived from the impact of the...
- A microsimulation model was developed to assess insurance enrollment growth in California due to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, increased demand for health services resulting from increased insurance enrollment, and resulting growth in the demand for health care workers. Full...
- Attending physician workload may be compromising patient safety and quality of care. Recent studies show hospitalists, intensivists, and surgeons report that excessive attending physician workload has a negative impact on patient care.1–3 Because physician teams and hospitals differ in composition...
- 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,...
- Foreign-educated and foreign-born health workers constitute a sizable and important portion of the US health care workforce. We review the distribution of these workers and their countries of origin, and we summarize the literature concerning their contributions to US health care. We also report on...
- OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study was to examine the effects of registered nurse (RN) education by determining whether nurse-sensitive patient outcomes were better in hospitals with a higher proportion of RNs with baccalaureate degrees. BACKGROUND: The Future of Nursing report recommends increasing...