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About Us
Overview/Background
Objectives/Approaches
Funders
Programs
Contact Us
Overview/Background
As health care continues to evolve, resulting changes have a profound
impact upon, and may be limited by, the nation's 10.5 million health care
workers. California's sheer size, combined with the leadership it has
taken in health care delivery and financing means that the state must
face health care workforce challenges head-on. Issues such as physician
unionization, nurse staffing, the roles of allied health care workers,
and public expectations of core competencies are important elements of
change in health care. Yet, reform may be limited by the supply and distribution
of health care professionals, regulatory policies, inflexible practice
patterns, or limitations on the training of individuals or professional
groups.
To address broad concerns of change in health professions, the Center
for the Health Professions at the University of California, San Francisco,
in partnership with the California HealthCare Foundation and The California
Endowment, created the California Workforce Initiative (CWI) in 2000.
The CWI relies on a wide spectrum of strategies and projects to develop
and sustain a vital and dynamic resource to promote, support and advance
change affecting the California health care workforce. Specifically, the
CWI addresses these core issues:
Supply and distribution of professionals - Is there an adequate
supply of the various health professionals? Is this supply commensurate
with the changing needs of our health care system? Are health workers
deployed geographically in a manner that promotes success?
Diversity of health professionals - Does the present supply
and future cohort of health professionals reflect the ethnic composition
of the current and future population of California? What is the correlation
between the health care professionals' communities of origin and the
communities they serve?
Skill base of the health professional - Do the skills possessed
by today's health professionals meet the needs of the institutions they
work in and the populations they serve? What new skills will be demanded
in the future and how will they be taught to current and future practitioners?
Regulation of health workers - Do current state regulations
of health care education, licensing and practice promote the goals of
expanded access, high quality and low costs? If not, what changes can
be made to create a policy and legal infrastructure that will promote
such outcomes? How will such changes impact the various health professionals,
schools and programs, and delivery systems?
Utilization of health care workers - In what ways are care delivery
organizations training, employing, and using health care professionals
in a manner that promotes optimal outcomes? What are the barriers to
improving these practices? What external stimuli could promote such
change?
Consumer and public understanding of health workforce issues -
How does the public understand the role of the health care worker? What
health workforce information can best serve the public in making informed
health care decisions?
Health care workers in transition - How are the changes in health
care affecting care providers? What private practices and public policies
can assist health care workers in making the transition to new systems
and arrangements for care delivery? How can the work of educators, delivery
systems, professional associations and unions be redirected to create
a stable and successful health care workforce during these times of
unprecedented change?
Objectives/Approaches
The California Workforce Initiative actively explores the issues of the
health professions with integrated approaches to producing social and
systemic change. These approaches include:
Monitoring ongoing changes in the workplace - CWI responds to
one of the most pressing needs in creating a more responsive health
care workforce through collecting, analyzing and disseminating information
about the health care workforce, with attention to the supply and characteristics
of professional groups, skill levels and training, and changing policy
concerns. The emergence of new workforce issues such as redefining patterns
of medical practice, the impact of women in medicine, the available
supply of nurses, under-representation of ethnic diversity among health
care professionals and changing workforce migration patterns.
Building Innovative Change Processes - Many of the existing
patterns of institutional and professional relationships are not producing
the types of changes in education, skills, and employment structures
needed to bring about substantive reform in health care. The CWI works
to develop an in-depth understanding of successful work partnerships
and applies these lessons to California health organizations. The CWI's
initial undertaking in this arena focused on how to remake allied health
work in hospitals, long-term care facilities, clinics and laboratories.
The point of this and other similar activity is to improve the understanding
and practice of partnerships and organizational change.
Developing Skills for Success in Managed Systems of Care - As
professionals reorient themselves to "population approaches"
to health, they need to develop a new set of skills, perspectives, values
and competencies. Through work such as that being done by The Network,
the CWI furthers its understanding of these skills and how to offer
them to various health professions.
Developing and Advancing Policy Reforms that Promote Workforce Change
- Many barriers to significant change in health workforce are created
by the financing and regulatory policies of the state and federal governments.
The CWI actively identifies and addresses selected policies in California
that may limit reform in the ways health care workers are trained, licensed
and deployed in practice.
Training and Developing Institutional Leaders - The expectations
for change in health workforce are enormous. These expectations reach
beyond the skills and competencies of many leaders and managers. The
CWI, in conjunction with other resources at the Center for the Health
Professions, provides a comprehensive set of programs for assisting
leaders in meeting these challenges.
Disseminating Workforce Information, Strategies and Optimal Practices
- Positive change will occur more quickly and with more impact if communication
about the problems, challenges, success and resources is widely distributed.
The CWI maintains a valuable resource center to disseminate such information
through its web site, programs, presentations and publications.
Funders
The California Workforce Initiative and its projects were funded by grants
from the California
HealthCare Foundation and The
California Endowment.
Contact Us
California Workforce Initiative
3333 California Street, Suite 410
San Francisco, CA 94118
(415) 476-1894
cdower@thecenter.ucsf.edu
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