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.
- Although the supply of nurses is likely to meet overall demand, the nature of a nurse’s job is changing dramatically. In redesigned health care systems, nurses are assuming expanded roles for a broad range of patients in ambulatory settings and communitybased care. These roles involve new...
- Medical assistants (MAs) are one of the fastest-growing occupations in the United States. As of 2014 there were about 585,000 MAs in the United States, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics projected the MA workforce to grow by 29% from 2012 to 2022. The MA population is primarily female, ethnically...
- A looming question for policy makers is how growing diversity of the US elderly population and greater use of home and community-based services will affect demand for long-term care workers. We used national surveys to analyze current use and staffing of long-term care, project demand for long-term...
- This webinar presents findings from a recent study conducted by the Health Workforce Research Center on Long-Term Care at the University of California, San Francisco, on the job transitions of long-term care workers. The study used the Current Population Survey to examine from which jobs and...
- Since its launch in 2008, the Clinic Leadership Institute Emerging Leaders Program (the Program) has been at the forefront of efforts to cultivate the leadership pipeline in California’s community health centers field. Created through a partnership between Blue Shield of California Foundation and...
- Licensed Medical Laboratory Technicians, or MLTs, are a relatively new occupation in California. In 2002, California legislation authorized the creation of the MLT job category (SB 1809) and delineated educational and licensing requirements. Although all other states and the US military have...
- Leaders in medical education have increasingly called for the incorporation of cost awareness and health care value into health professions curricula. Emerging efforts have thus far focused on physicians, but foundational competencies need to be defined related to health care value that span all...
- This report summarizes the findings from a survey of general acute care (GAC) hospital employers of registered nurses (RNs) in California conducted in fall 2014. This is the fifth annual survey of hospital RN employers; together these surveys provide an opportunity to evaluate overall demand for...
- This study compares different approaches to measuring the number of nurse practitioners (NPs) providing primary care services using data from the 2012 U.S. National Sample Survey of Nurse Practitioners, North Carolina licensing data from 2011, and a 2010 California survey of nurse practitioners and...
- The California Board of Registered Nursing Annual Schools Survey collects data about nursing programs and their students and faculty from August 1 through July 31. This report focuses on post-licensure education programs.
- The Annual School Report provides data about registered nurse education programs in California. The reports are published annually, and each new report includes historic data.
- Asian Health Services (AHS) is an urban federally-qualified health center in Oakland, California. It has developed new roles for medical assistants and other frontline staff to capitalize on their language capacity and other skills to provide health coaching and health navigation services to an...
- Fifty years after the Equal Pay Act, the male-female salary gap has narrowed in many occupations. Yet pay inequality persists for certain occupations, including medicine and nursing. Studies have documented salary differences across clinical settings for diverse cohorts of physicians and higher...
- Concern abounds about whether the health care workforce is sufficient to meet changing demands spurred by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). We project that by 2022 the health care industry needs three to four million additional workers, forty percent of which is related to demand growth under the ACA...
- Concern abounds about whether the health care workforce is sufficient to meet changing demands spurred by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). We project that by 2022 the health care industry needs three to four million additional workers, forty percent of which is related to demand growth under the ACA...
- OBJECTIVES: The American Association of Colleges of Nursing recommends that nursing schools transition their advanced practice registered nurse (APRN) programs to doctor of nursing practice (DNP) programs by 2015. However, most schools have not yet made this full transition. The purpose of this...
- In the past decade, the health care industry, and long-term care (LTC) in particular, saw substantial job growth. In anticipation of growing demand for LTC due to an aging demographic, employment opportunities in LTC are expected to surpass those of other U.S. sectors. Workforce planners are...
- 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...