Recommendation:  Invest in programs that seek to build a more diverse healthcare workforce.

What we heard:

Inadequate language access services and cultural misunderstanding are compromising quality of care in our region. Educating, training, and employing immigrants and other minorities as community health workers, interpreters, administrative staff, technicians and clinicians will alleviate current gaps in services and cultivate a strong, diverse healthcare workforce for our future.

What we’ve done to date to advance this recommendation:

• Provided a grant in 2004 to the Greater Washington Board of Trade to support a regional health care workforce study, Who Cares? Examining Greater Washington’s Health Care Workforce

• Provided a grant to the Community Foundation of the National Capital Region to help launch the Greater Washington Workforce Development Collaborative (GWWDC), a funding partnership between local foundations and the Annie E. Casey, Ford and Hitachi Foundations and the U.S. Department of Labor. CHF will also serve as a member of the Steering Committee and the Health Care Task Force.

What we’ve learned:

Good jobs are a pathway to good health for the residents of our region. But thousands of our residents, particularly low-income minorities and immigrants, miss out on critical educational and training opportunities that could help them advance their skills, education and earnings. At the same time there are employers, particularly in the health care sector, desperate to find qualified candidates to fill open positions.

We are committed to working in partnership with other members of the Greater Washington Workforce Development Collaborative to address some of the barriers to aligning employer demand with our community’s supply of untapped potential. According to the report, Who Cares? Examining Greater Washington’s Health Care Workforce, these barriers include:

• Regional fragmentation and competition among and between health care employers, educational and training institutions, government organizations and social service providers
• Supply shortages, including shortages of faculty and clinical sites, which limit educational institutions’ capacity to meet the demand for health care professionals
• Lack of skill development and career readiness in significant numbers of area youth and adults
• Need for a stronger social support network to more effectively recruit, retain and help health care professionals advance along a career ladder

Next steps:

In its first year, the Collaborative’s Health Care Task Force will work to build partnerships with health care employers and with education and training institutions.  It will also look at opportunities to build the capacity of education and training programs so that they can meet the needs of residents and employers. It will also work to address policy and systemic barriers to employment.

Resources, model programs and practices:

SkillWorks: Partners for a Productive Workforce, a 5-year initiative to coordinate workforce development in Boston 

Training Futures, a nonprofit job training program in Northern Virginia

Northern Virginia Healthforce, a strategy to address healthcare workforce shortages in Northern Virginia