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.
- PURPOSE: Little is known about whether different types of physician and nonphysician primary care clinicians vary in their propensity to care for underserved populations. The objective of this study was to compare the geographic distribution and patient populations of physician and nonphysician...
- Respiratory care practitioners (RCPs) comprise a critical sector of the allied health care workforce though the profession is not well understood or highly visible to the public, even though RCPs are very involved with direct patient care. This issue brief examines this workforce in California...
- PURPOSE: To create a framework for teaching the knowledge and skills of practice-based learning and improvement to medical students and residents based on proven, effective strategies. METHOD: The authors conducted a Medline search of English-language articles published between 1996 and May 2001,...
- The clinical laboratory workforce comprises a critical sector of the healthcare workforce, and as with other types of healthcare workers such as registered nurses and pharmacists, there have been documented shortages of these workers for several years. This issue brief examines this workforce in...
- With 65,000 practitioners nationwide, chiropractic is the third largest “primary” health profession in the US (behind medicine and dentistry). This issue brief examines the chiropractic workforce in California. Beginning with its history and recent growth, the report looks into supply, demand and...
- California has a considerable and increasing need for interpretive services in health care. Currently one in every five Californians, over 6 million people, qualify as Limited English Proficient (LEP) and could be expected to benefit directly from improved interpretive services and the attendant...
- Minimum Staffing Ratios: The California Workforce Initiative Survey
- The pharmacy technician profession is experiencing rapid change and growth, mirroring changes in the pharmacy profession and in pharmaceutical treatment. This issue brief examines the growth and evolution of this profession as it has emerged over the last 10 years in retail, hospital, and other...
- Over the past two decades there has been a growing call for parity between mental and physical health care. Mental health services have been stigmatized, provided unsystematically, and they came late to the third party reimbursement process. Today the field is still beset by a vast array of often...
- This report provides data on the demographics of the PHN workforce in five counties in California; the educational preparation of the PHN workforce; the job market and employment issues for the PHN workforce; and the scope of PHN practice. Although the study was limited to five counties, these...
- Public health nurses (PHNs) make up the largest group of public health workers and are important health care providers for a variety of underserved populations, yet data about PHN demographics and practice are limited. This report provides data on the demographics of the PHN workforce in five...
- As health care in California continues to experience major changes and challenges, it is important to periodically check the pulse of one key group of participants in this system: the state’s physicians. This report presents the results from the 2001/2002 UCSF California Physician Survey. The...
- Policy brief summarizing findings from site visits and interviews with heatlh care executives and primary care physicians in six rural communities in California.
- Legislative calls for new methodologies to identify dentally underserved areas are an acknowledgement of the growing concern that the existing Dental Health Professional Shortage Area (DHPSA) designation criteria are outdated and ineffective. This report explores the history of DHPSAs, critiques...
- By many measures, the practice of dentistry has improved for the dentist over the past decade. Hours of work are down, and compensation is increasing. However, there is a growing disconnect between the dominant pattern of practice of the profession and the oral health needs of the nation. To...
- Many registered nurses believe that nurse staffing in acute care hospitals is inadequate. In 1999 California became the first state to mandate minimum nurse-to-patient ratios in hospitals. State officials announced draft ratios in January 2002 and expect to implement the legislation by July 2003....
- Widely perceived shortages of pharmacists have been reported across California by a spectrum of providers. Advances in drug therapies and technology, the shear number of prescriptions now written for American consumers, and an aging demographic likely to increase pharmaceutical usage has severely...
- PURPOSE: Block ambulatory rotations and longitudinal ambulatory care experiences are now common in U.S. medical schools, but little is known about their efficacy. Through a structured review of the medical literature from 1966 through March 2000, the authors summarize the characteristics of, the...
- Critical health care issues related to the available supply of professional workers have emerged across the nation as hospitals and clinics struggle to provide needed services. Despite this increased awareness, little attention has been paid to these issues as they play out in health care “safety...
- Registered nurse pre-licensure education in California.
- Long-term care is a looming crisis in California. One of the things needed to address this crisis is better workforce supply and demand data. The purpose of this fieldwork project is to assess information available for long-term care workforce planning and policymaking in California. This study...
- This paper assesses the relative value to employers and Registered Nurses (RNs) of different types of basic education in nursing: the associate degree; the baccalaureate degree; and the nursing diploma. Using the National Sample Surveys of Registered Nurses the determinants of nursing wages are...
- Lack of clarity in definitions of shortages of hospital registered nurses may cause problems for effective policy making, particularly if different measures for identifying a nurse shortage lead to different conclusions about which hospitals and regions are experiencing a shortage. The authors...
- The objective of the study was to examine the characteristics of acute-care hospitals that report registered nurse shortages when a widespread shortage exists and when a widespread shortage is no longer evident. The authors used secondary data from the American Hospital Association's Nursing...
- The integration of allopathic and non-allopathic health care systems, disciplines and modalities is fast becoming a part of the mainstream health care delivery system in the United States. This report has several purposes. It aims first to set standard questions and areas to cover in an assessment...
- The integration of allopathic and non-allopathic health care systems, disciplines and modalities is fast becoming a part of the mainstream health care delivery system in the United States. This report provides information about naturopathic physicians, naturopaths and others employing naturopathic...
- OBJECTIVES: This study estimates the supply and geographic distribution of dentists in California and examines the community characteristics associated with supply of dentists. METHODS: The number of practicing dentists was estimated from American Dental Association data on licensed dentists in...
- The racial and ethnic composition of the registered nurse (RN) workforce in California is not at parity with the composition of the population. We find that the underrepresentation of African Americans in nursing in California appears to be due to lower overall educational attainment among African...
- In 1999, California passed the first legislation in the United States to establish minimum staffing levels in hospitals for registered nurses (RNs) and licensed vocational nurses. The author provides estimates of the increase in RN expenditures required by this mandate, by hospital size and for...
- Widely distributed to policymakers in California and nationally, this report offered a comprehensive profile of the California physician workforce in the year 2000. Using existing and original data, this study provided information about the aggregate supply of physicians, specialty and geographic...