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.
- 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,...
- 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...
- The biomedical model has formed the foundation and defined the character of contemporary American medical practice and education. There is a growing perception, however, that the biomedical model cannot fully reflect the broad clinical realities of modern health care and that practitioners must...
- Affirmative action has been used by institutions and individuals in the United States since the 1960s to increase the participation of women and racial and ethnic minorities in employment, contracting and higher education. This report utilizes a broad perspective to review the data and research...
- For several decades, researchers, policy analysts and consumer advocates have consistently found that the care provided by midwives differs from the medical model of care in ways that benefit women and their families in terms of quality, satisfaction and costs. In early 1998 a Taskforce on...
- As the country strives to produce larger numbers of generalist physicians, considerable controversy has arisen over whether or not generalist applicants can be identified, recruited, and influenced to keep a generalist-oriented commitment throughout medical training. The authors present new and...