The above links will take you to the Center for the Health Professions site.

Educational Program Responses to Workforce Challenges

California, along with the rest of the United States, has been experiencing workforce shortages in the respiratory therapy and allied radiology fields. Analysts speculate that these shortages are a summation of common plights in most of the health care workforce; this includes increased health care demands, the imminent retiring of health professionals, locating competent replacements, and an educational system possibly facing expansion limitations. Projections based on Bureau of Labor Statistic data suggests that shortages are expected to persist in these fields. The research team will focus on investigating the perspectives of educational leaders in respiratory therapy and allied radiology on workforce supply and demand trends and their institutional initiatives to provide a strong pipeline of students to the workforce. Interview subjects will be asked to share information about their program's size, student demographic profiles and also past and future efforts in response to market demands in their geographic region. In addition, we are interested in educators' perspectives on the challenges and limitations encountered in managing their programs as well as a broader assessment on the current issues in their respective fields.

This study is a project of the Health Workforce Tracking Collaborative, which is funded by The California Wellness Foundation and The California Endowment, and administered at the UCSF Center for the Health Professions.

For more information, please contact Vincent Lok at vlok@thecenter.ucsf.edu.