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.
- An influx of new students in the mental health professions will be needed in order to serve a growing number of Californians. Beyond addressing a shortage of mental health providers, a more diverse mental health workforce is desired in order to better reflect the increasing diversity in California’...
- Research shows that unions have some effect on nurse wages, for example a modest effect on the wage structure by eliminating race gaps on one hand, but giving lower premiums for experience.
- The mental health workforce is challenged to provide needed mental health services to a growing and increasingly diverse population in California. By interviewing stakeholders and reviewing key literature this report seeks to assess the supply, demand, education, training, and diversity of...
- Each year, the California Board of Registered Nursing (BRN) requires all pre-licensure registered nursing programs in California to complete a survey detailing statistics of their programs, students and faculty. Information gathered from these surveys is compiled into a database and used to analyze...
- In 2004, California became the first state to implement minimum-nurse-staffing ratios in acute care hospitals. We examined the wages of registered nurses (RNs) before and after the legislation was enacted. Using four data sets—the National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses, the Current Population...
- This presentation takes a closer look at the impact of the CPRS and BCMA implementation in the VA on nurses and care quality, as this qualitative and quantitative study finds that overall quality neither increased nor decreased and nurse staffing was not affected.
- In 2004, California began requiring that acute-care hospitals maintain certain minimum ratios between nurses and patients, making it the first state in the nation to do so. However, little is known about what effects the staffing ratios have had, either on the hospitals themselves or the quality of...
- Each year, the California Board of Registered Nursing (BRN) requires all pre-licensure registered nursing programs in California to complete a survey detailing statistics of their programs, students and faculty. The survey collects data from August 1 through July 31 of the following year....
- Purpose–A very limited number of studies have explored factors related to emergency medical services (EMS) workers leaving their jobs and the profession. This paper aims to investigate the correlates of intent to leave EMS jobs and the profession and compared two types of workers: emergency medical...
- OBJECTIVES: To report on the creation of a leadership development program targeted exclusively at pharmacists working in management in the professional community. SETTING: Large staff-model health maintenance organization (HMO) in California between 2004 and 2008. PRACTICE DESCRIPTION: The Pharmacy...
- The California Board of Registered Nursing (BRN) is interested in knowing more about the movement of nurses into and out of California and commissioned the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) to research behaviors of these nurses. Every month during the six-month study period, the BRN...
- This report provides an overview of the dental hygiene workforce labor market in California.
- Registered dental hygienists (RDHs) focus on providing critical preventive and therapeutic dental hygiene services for the population of California. The labor market for dental hygienists is responsive to variations in multiple factors at the local level. This study explores the labor market for...
- The development of the future oral health care workforce is a central focus of WICHE, which has a long history of partnering with states to improve access to dental and other professional training via the Professional Student Exchange Program. This report highlights some of the key trends, issues,...
- One of the many challenges facing America’s health care system has been securing sufficient numbers of practitioners to fill jobs and meet patient needs. Allied health professions particularly hard hit in recent years include respiratory care and imaging (or radiologic technology). To better...
- Objective: To compare alternative measures of nurse staffing and assess the relative strengths and limitations of each measure. Data Sources/Study Setting: Primary and secondary data from 2000 and 2002 on hospital nurse staffing from the American Hospital Association, California Office of Statewide...
- Most studies of nurse turnover focus on job turnover, which could reflect nurse advancement and thus not be detrimental to the workforce. The authors discuss findings from a study that involved 2 cohorts of graduates from registered nursing and licensed vocational nursing community college programs...
- Concern over the lack of diversity in California’s RN population has been raised by educators, nursing leadership, private foundations, and policy makers. This issue brief is one in a series of briefs presenting a profile of California’s current and projected population, selected health professions...
- California has become one of the most racially and ethnically diverse states in the country, and is projected to become even more so in the coming decades. This issue brief is one in a series of briefs presenting a profile of California’s current and projected population, selected health...
- For the first time, the Legislature has charged the state’s Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development with establishing a clearinghouse of data about California’s health care workforce. Such a coordinated effort could mean that policy makers will have good, solid information on which to...
- The phenomenon of career inactivity in professional nursing has been historically portrayed in the literature as a major cause of disequilibrium in the registered nurse labor market. However, there remains a general lack of understanding of the diverse forces that shape the inactive nurse pool and...
- The trend of increasing demand for health -- and especially allied health workers -- in CA is projected to continue. This presentation takes a closer look at the data as related to employment, income, and educational opportunities.
- California has become one of the most racially and ethnically diverse states in the country, and is projected to become even more so in the coming decades. This issue brief is one in a series of briefs presenting a profile of California’s current and projected population, selected health...
- This presentation delivers the results of a qualitative and quantitative study examining how organizational culture affects an IT implementation, and how staff views CPRS and BCMA. For example, groups who accepted that the implementation would take time and questions had more successful...
- A racially and ethnically diverse physician workforce is widely seen as a key component in the effort to address health disparities related to race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Program directors, faculty, and medical students all share the perception that a diverse student body...
- As part of a large scale practice analysis on Phlebotomy Technicians (PBTs), Medical Laboratory Technicians (MLTs), and Medical Technologists (MTs), additional data on four "home made measures" of professional-related outcomes, i.e., professional development, quality assurance monitoring, employer...
- California has become one of the most racially and ethnically diverse states in the country, and is projected to become even more so in the coming decades. This issue brief is one in a series of briefs presenting a profile of California’s current and projected population, selected health...
- Emergency medical technicians (EMTs) and paramedics are a critical component of any community’s Emergency Medical Services (EMS) system. Assuring the continued viability of the prehospital EMS workforce is a key concern for many local, State, Federal, and tribal EMS agencies, as well as national...
- The move toward “cultural competence” that responds to the diversity of California’s population is reflected in efforts of California hospitals to provide linguistically appropriate care for their patients who have limited English proficiency. Legal mandates underscore this need. Health care...
- In recent years, attention has focused on the nursing profession due to a crippling shortage of registered nurses (RNs) that has been reported throughout California, the United States, and in many other countries. California’s nursing shortage is among the most severe in the United States and many...