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.
- Dental therapists (DTs) are primary care dental providers, used globally, and were introduced in the United States (US) in 2005. DTs have now been adopted in 13 states and several Tribal nations. This study aimed to qualitatively examine the drivers and outcomes of the US dental therapy movement...
- The goal of this study was to explore challenges and opportunities that dental public health (DPH) residents and recent graduates experienced during and after their residency training programs in the US. In this qualitative study, to recruit participants, study invitations were distributed to 93...
- Personal Care Aides (PCAs) are vital to the well-being of people with disabilities yet there are shortages of these workers in many parts of the country. PCAs are employed to support people with disabilities by providing assistance with basic daily needs (such as meal preparation, bathing, dressing...
- The nation requires a workforce adequately sized and educated in the specialty areas needed to address the health needs of all people that practices in the places, settings, and specialties where they are needed most; that works efficiently and effectively; and practices in systems that protects...
- Different staffing configurations in primary and geriatric care practices could have implications for how best to deliver services that are essential for a growing population of older adults. Using data from a 2018 survey of physicians (MDs) and nurse practitioners (NPs) working in primary and...
- Although many factors contribute to the high prevalence of oral health problems and widening disparities in the U.S., limited oral health literacy has emerged as a major contributor. Oral health literacy (OHL) refers to people’s abilities to access, understand and use oral health information to...
- Health systems are uniquely positioned to advance health equity in communities by ensuring that workers are well, resilient, and equipped to deliver high-quality care. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how work environments in health systems affects the well-being of workers, whose capacity to...
- Job satisfaction is a critical component of the professional work environment and is often ascertained through surveys that include structured or open-ended questions. Differences between the job satisfaction clusters were mostly driven by satisfaction with workload, adequacy of the clerical...
- During the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous concerns about the nursing workforce have been reported. This study used data from two surveys conducted in California to assess the current and future supply and demand of RNs and to learn how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting this essential workforce.
- The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) State Innovation Models (SIMs) initiative funded 17 states to implement health care payment and delivery system reforms to improve health system performance. This study aimed to evaluate SIMs role in improved health information technology (HIT)...
- The use of professional interpretation is associated with improvements in overall healthcare of patients with limited English proficiency. For these patients, it is important to understand whether quality of professional interpretation in-person is preserved using remote interpretation modalities (...
- Despite considerable research on nursing turnover, few studies have considered turnover among nurses working in home health care. Using novel administrative data from one of the largest home health care organizations in the United States, this study examined turnover among home health nurses,...
- PCAs provide essential services for people with self-care disabilities (eg, difficulty dressing, bathing, and running errands) and yet are not sufficiently available where there are higher numbers of people with self-care disabilities. This StoryMap online resource explores where people with...
- Person-centered care (PCC) is the standard for the delivery of long-term services and supports (LTSS). In this article, we summarize the state of the science on meaningful outcomes and workforce development and discuss what is needed to ensure that person-centered LTSS becomes a universal reality....
- The misuse of opioids is a health crisis in the United States. Medication treatment for opioid use disorder reduces negative health outcomes, but there are widespread shortages of appropriately trained and credentialed providers. Advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) have recently become...
- The 2019-2020 Board of Registered Nursing (BRN) School Survey was designed to provide comparable data to prior surveys and was updated based on recommendations from the Board'sNursing Education and Workforce Advisory Committee. The School Survey is primarily intended to collect data on pre-...
- The 2019-20 Board of Registered Nursing (BRN) School Survey was based on prior BRN surveys and modified based on recommendations from the Nursing Education & Workforce Advisory Committee (NEWAC), which consists of nursing education and industry stakeholders from across California. The...
- Approximately 1 in 5 U.S. adults experienced a mental illness in the past year, a number that is expected to rise amid a shortage of mental health and substance use disorder (SUD) providers. One way to address this growing need for behavioral health services is through the use of peer providers, or...
- California is facing a shortage of health professionals to meet the needs of its large, diverse, and aging population, and the situation is worsening. Shortages exist across professions and geographies, with sizeable urban and rural underserved populations. Despite increasing population diversity,...
- The California Improvement Network is a community of health care professionals committed to identifying and spreading better ideas for care delivery. The summer 2021 issue of CIN Connections contains strategies and reflections from health care leaders as they wrestle with increased levels of...
- Oral health care faces ongoing workforce challenges that affect patient access and outcomes. While the Medicare program provides an estimated $14.6 billion annually in graduate medical education (GME) payments to teaching hospitals, including explicit support for dental and podiatry programs,...
- The overwhelming nursing home resident infection and death rates from the COVID-19 pandemic has led to the question: What policies can best protect nursing home residents now and in the future? In this article we present data that inadequate nurse staffing levels and high staff turnover rates are...
- Stay-at-home policies related to the COVID-19 pandemic could disrupt adolescents’ substance use and physical activity. This study aimed to compare adolescents’ substance use and physical activity behaviors before and after stay-at-home restrictions. In this cohort, a reduction in e-cigarette use...
- Poor oral health, and biological impact of oral disease, affects a person's general health and well-being. Using electronic dental health record data to identify high-risk dental caries patients coupled with a new oral health team member, the dental care advocate (DCA) facilitated the dental...
- The 2019-2020 Board of Registered Nursing (BRN) School Survey was designed to provide comparable data to prior surveys and was updated based on recommendations from the Board's Nursing Education and Workforce Advisory Committee. The School Survey is primarily intended to collect data on pre-...
- There are indeed many pressing questions and issues facing the discipline of Nursing including significant numbers of faculty retirements, concerns about the rigor of nursing PhD programs, declines in PhD enrollments, and the persistent lack of diversity across many domains among nursing faculty....
- Care coordination is a key strategy used to improve health outcomes and efficiency, yet there are limited examples in dentistry. A large dental accountable care organization piloted care coordination by retraining existing administrative staff to coordinate the care of high-risk patients. Following...
- This article examines the relationship between federal regulations, state scope-of-practice regulations on nurse practitioners (NPs), and buprenorphine prescribing patterns using pharmacy claims data from Optum’s deidentified Clinformatics Data Mart between January 2015 and September 2018. The...
- Although the number of active physicians increased by 21% between 2006 and 2018, and exceeded the 10% population growth, many areas in California face substantial shortages of primary care providers and specialists. California Physicians: A Portrait of Practice presents detailed information about...
- Nursing is the single largest health profession in the state. These quick reference guides look at supply, demographics, education, distribution, and pay for registered nurses (RNs) and licensed vocational nurses (LVNs), using the most recent data available. Key findings include: Non-White RNs...