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.
- 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...
- The biennial California Survey of Registered Nurses provides information about the demographics, education, and employment of registered nurses in the state.
- This presentation takes a look at the complex reality of nursing workforce planning. For example, policy makers often lack the expertise as well as concrete research to make positive decisions. Even if programs are approved they may not be funded due to a state’s budget crisis.
- This presentation explains different approaches to calculate and forecast “demand”: from the overly simplified “per capita” model, to the non-normative market demand and a “need” assessment model. Suggested ways to improve forecasting include not looking at one workforce group in isolation and...
- Forecasting the health workforce is crucial to understanding whether perceived shortages are real, to learn whether a shortage is likely to persist, and to guide policy to educate and retain health workers. This presentation provides strategies for forecasting workforce supply and demand and...
- The 2006 Survey of California Registered Nurses is the fifth in a series of surveys designed to describe licensed nurses in California and to examine changes over time. Other studies were completed in 1990, 1993, 1997, and 2004. The survey solicited information about: Opinions about the most...
- Information from California’s professional and vocational education programs are a key link in estimating the supply of workers for individual health professions. The principal objective of this project is to map the “education link” in California’s supply chain for selected health professions....
- Objective To determine if professional medical interpreters have a positive impact on clinical care for limited English proficiency (LEP) patients. Data Sources A systematic literature search, limited to the English language, in PubMed and PsycINFO for publications between 1966 and September 2005...
- This report provides a profile of the dental hygiene workforce in California.
- Registered Dental Hygienists (RDHs) play a critical role in efforts to promote access to oral health care and prevent dental diseases. The heightened attention on the nation's oral health needs and growing disparities in oral health, as well as pending revisions in federal procedures for...
- Minnesota is often ranked as the healthiest state in America. However, for many Minnesotans, high quality health care and high health status are still elusive. In particular, several racial and ethnic minority groups in Minnesota experience higher rates of disease and premature death than white...
- There is a growing interest in the use of community health workers in various roles in the US health care system. These workers go by various titles and names—including promotora and community health advisor—but all assist members of the communities they serve. As the role of these workers becomes...
- Despite evidence that hospital use of licensed practical nurses (LPNs) declined in the 1990s, the current registered nurse (RN) shortage has prompted interest in LPNs as substitutes for RNs. Hospitals, being the dominant employer of RNs, have an economic incentive to use less expensive LPNs as...
- In most regions of California, there is now a shortage of registered nurses, and shortages will grow over the next 25 years. This report presents forecasts of supply and demand for RNs in regions of California. A previous report estimated future supply and demand for RNs statewide, finding a...
- The workforce providing noninstitutional personal assistance and home health services tripled between 1989 and 2004, according to U.S. survey data, growing at a much faster rate than the population needing such services. During the same period, Medicaid spending for such services increased...
- LPNs may be able to help fill some of the gaps caused by the nursing shortage, but little research has been conducted on the demographic characteristics of LPNs, their education and scope of practice, and the demand for their services, all of which vary from state to state. In 2002 and 2003, the...
- The nursing shortage has stimulated renewed attention to understanding factors that may enhance the recruitment of students into nursing programs and the retention of registered nurses in the workforce. Many activities have been initiated to address the shortage of nurses, including increasing...
- A poor public "image" of the nurse is believed to contribute to nurse shortages. We surveyed more than 3,000 college students in science and math courses in a seven-county region of California's Central Valley to assess their perceptions of a career as a nurse in relation to a career as a physical...
- OBJECTIVE: To assess the impact of changes in relative health maintenance organization (HMO) penetration on changes in the physician-to-population ratio in California counties when changes in the economic conditions in California counties relative to the U.S. average are taken into account. DATA...
- Many U.S. residents who speak little English may face language barriers when seeking health care. This article describes what is currently known about language barriers in health care and outlines a research agenda based on mismatches between the current state of knowledge of language barriers and...
- During a labor shortage, employment-based benefits can be used to recruit and retain workers. This paper provides data on the availability of benefits to registered nurses (RNs), reports on how health care leaders are approaching the provision of employment-based benefits for nurses, and considers...
- As the U.S. experiences a rapid aging of the nation's population, with the number of Americans age 65 and over doubling between 2000 and 2030, the demand for long-term care will rise significantly. The nation faces critical shortages in the health care workforce, particularly among direct...
- Of the 33 million people in California, the nation's most populous state, minority groups now constitute the majority of the population. Many sources predict that by 2060, the entire country will mirror the diversity of California today. Like the rest of the country, California is experiencing a...
- This article examines the literature on cost-effectiveness in nursing, and considers the relationship between this literature and decision-making in health care systems. Researchers have attempted to examine costs and benefits of nurse staffing and nursing interventions for decades. There are...
- This chapter of the 25th volume of the Annual Review of Gerontology and Geriatrics reviews key issues associated with the aging registered nurse workforce, particularly challenges of ensuring an adequate supply of nurses in the future.
- Driven by the aging population and the efficacy of drug therapy in the management of chronic disease, the increased use of pharmaceutical products has become the fastest growing, most dynamic part of the health care system. This issue brief finds the pharmacy safety net facing a looming crisis. The...
- There is substantial disagreement regarding the impact of hospitalists on costs, quality, and satisfaction with inpatient care. The authors reviewed 21 evaluations of the use of hospitalists in U.S. hospitals. Most evaluations found that patients managed by hospitalists had lower total costs or...
- The objective of the study was to produce a report to inform the health professions educational community, the health care community, and the public about issues related to the clinical laboratory workforce. Research questions addressed the size of the workforce, demographic characteristics, role...
- High vacancy rates in the clinical laboratory profession have led to the use of wage increases and financial incentives to attract and retain workers. American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP) surveys indicate that wages for Medical Technologists and Medical Laboratory Technicians have been...
- On any given day American doctors; offices, hospital emergency rooms, and health centers, are alive with the sounds not only of Spanish, but also of Haitian, Creole, Somali, Hmong, Mandarin, Russian, and other languages from across the globe. These languages communicate more than words. They can...