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.
- Today, for a host of internal and external factors, many of the health professions appear to be losing their appeal to potential workers. Nursing, nationwide and in California, has become a pressing example. The state faces severe nursing shortages, particularly in some geographic areas and within...
- For a host of complex and interrelated reasons California may not have adequate numbers of nurses with appropriate skills over the coming decades. This problem is just rising to the attention of the profession, nursing educators, and managers in the health system. Increasingly, it will affect the...
- As California implements its minimum staffing legislation, it becomes increasingly important that researchers continue to examine the relationship between RN staffing and quality of care. Research does not support the general assumption that more RN staffing is always better; policymakers and...
- California and the nation now face an oral disease situation that is of a crisis nature. The situation has developed over several decades and involves a complex set of problems, institutions, attitudes and financing arrangements. For millions across California, access to oral health care services...
- In California, approximately 4.5 million Medicaid beneficiaries are eligible for dental services, yet fewer than half (44%) utilize these services on an annual basis. While several factors may contribute to this low use of dental services, a major deterrent is finding a dentist who will accept...
- In a March 1998 Journal of Nursing Administration article, I reported that nurse staffing did not, in fact, decline through 1996 in California, where concerns about nurse staffing have been prominent. In this article, I provide a data update indicating an increase in the number of hours worked by...
- CONTEXT: Many rural and inner-city communities in the United States have persistent shortages of health professionals. In addition, health services are increasingly delivered in community-based settings by interdisciplinary teams. Yet, health professions students in the US continue to receive most...
- Nurse practitioners (NPs), physician assistants (PAs) and certified nurse midwives (CNMs) play growing roles in the health care workforce. Experts recommended in the mid-1990s that their numbers be increased to address concerns about an inadequate supply and mal-distribution of primary care...
- Access to dental services in California is an issue of increasing concern to federal and state policy makers, as demonstrated by both new legislation addressing access to dental care and increased funding for existing programs. Recent research has shown that many Californians do not receive regular...
- OBJECTIVE: To examine the effects of managed care and the prospective payment system on the hospital employment of registered nurses (RNs), licensed practical nurses (LPNs), and aides. DATA SOURCES: Hospital-level data from California's Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD)...
- BACKGROUND: Little is known about long-term improvements in medical students' knowledge, attitudes, and use of blood and body fluid precautions following preclinical training. METHODS: We evaluated an educational and skills-training program emphasizing double gloving for high-risk surgical...
- Allied and auxiliary health care workers play critical support roles in the health care system. Any significant reform in the way health care is delivered will require changes in their training and utilization. This comprehensive report by The California Twenty-First Century Workforce Project...
- This report provides a descriptive overview of local public health departments in California. Data are provided on the size and scope of agencies, characteristics of the population served, managed care interactions, partnerships in the community and the pressing issues for these agencies. This...
- The decision of the Regents of the University of California (UC) to end selective admissions for racial/ethnic minorities in 1995 and the passage of Proposition 209 in 1996 have generated great concern about the enrollment of underrepresented minorities (URMs) in UC medical schools. This report...
- Over the past 2 years, concerns have arisen about the adequacy of the supply of RNs in California and the rest of the United States. Nurse leaders have called upon the California State Legislature to respond to concerns by increasing funding for RN education at public colleges and universities. The...
- This fourth and final major report of the Pew Health Professions Commission comes at the end of the most dynamic decade ever faced by the nation’s health professionals. As disruptive as this period has been, however, it may only have been the prelude. The health care system in the US will continue...
- As managed care creates new mechanisms for the delivery of health services, it will inevitably put pressure on the role and function of health professionals. Physician assistants (PAs) will not be exempt from these changes. In fact, many of these shifts may strain the relationship between the PA...
- Health care workforce regulation plays a critical role in consumer protection. For most of this century, the state regulation of health care occupations and professions has established a minimum standard for safe practice and removed the egregiously incompetent. To become a more viable element of...
- Editorial that briefly described findings from a project on strategies for the future of nursing.
- Current physician workforce trends indicate a need to reform federal graduate medical education (GME) policy to better align policy with market signals and the public interest. The transformation of health care is affecting other health professions as well, but in no other case are the gaps between...
- Editorial accompanying an article on trends in the supplies of advanced practice nurses and physician assistants. Full Publication
- With the rapid pace of change in the educational and health care systems today, the ability of health professions education accreditation to respond to the needs of the professions, educational institutions, students and the ultimate consumers of health services has come into question. These...
- Concerns have been voiced about an impending oversupply of physicians in the United States. Do these concerns also apply to California, a state with many unique demographic characteristics? We examined trends in physician supply and medical education in California and the United States between 1980...
- In this article, we examine the financing mechanisms for graduate medical education (GME) in the United States. In so doing, we identify Medicare as the single largest contributor to GME and the most important barrier to producing a physician workforce that is appropriately sized, balanced, and...
- There was a steady increase in the number of hours worked by nursing personnel in California hospitals from 1977 through 1996, mostly due to an increase in the number of hours worked by registered nurses (RNs). The hours worked by nursing personnel and RNs per case-mix adjusted discharge and per...
- In December 1995 the Taskforce on Health Care Workforce Regulation released their findings and recommendations in a report entitled Reforming Health Care Workforce Regulation: Policy Considerations for the 21st Century. The report put forth ten recommendations for reform and offered policy options...
- PURPOSE: To identify previously unrecognized factors influencing medical students' career choices and to better characterize the effects of educational experiences, role models, and educational debt on career decisions. METHOD: Fifty-two third- and fourth-year students were recruited from three...
- Accreditation amounts to a public seal of approval - a guarantee of quality. But with the proliferation of agencies that accredit academic programs over the years, this process has become increasingly complex - to the point where many in higher education have come to question its value, especially...
- Though it has served us well in the past, health care workforce regulation is out of step with today’s health care needs and expectations. It is criticized for increasing costs, restricting managerial and professional flexibility, limiting access to care, and having an equivocal relationship to...
- American health care is experiencing fundamental change. What was recently conceived as a set of policy changes for reform is now being lent the form and weight of institutional reality by the enormous power of the trillion-dollar health care market. In five brief years the organizational,...