To help policymakers plan for allied health workforce changes, they need easily accessible data. The Center for Health Workforce Studies at the University of Washington has multiple dashboards that allows users to explore publicly available data on current allied health workforce trends. This dashboard allows users to compare work and residence locations for sixteen different…
Millions health care workers lost their jobs during the first peak of the pandemic when clinics closed temporarily and hospitals postponed surgeries to prevent the spread of the COVID-19. Although most of those jobs returned by the fall of 2020 and the job market continued to improve, health care employment is still lower than pre-pandemic…
The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified long-standing workforce issues and further weakened the financial position of many rural health facilities as they have attempted to mobilize their workforce while struggling to absorb the added costs of patient care and invest in the additional resources needed for pandemic response. The federal government has addressed some of these…
Birth doulas, who support pregnant women during the perinatal period, have positive impacts on pregnancy and birth outcomes, particularly among underserved populations. However, health workforce-related barriers challenge the development of robust doula services in the United States. This article examines various approaches to train, recruit, and employ doulas, as well as what system-level changes are…
Navigators in the federal Insurance Navigator Program provide enrollment assistance, outreach, and education to individuals who are eligible for health insurance coverage. Their work is key to public health efforts to address inequities but continues to be poorly understood and undervalued. This article examines the navigator profession to better understand the equity work they do,…
Implicit bias of healthcare providers often influences patient care. Bias awareness is a key element included in implicit bias education and can help motivate behavior change. This article discusses a study that evaluated whether exposure to a brief online course on implicit bias increased bias awareness for health providers.
Health workforce research and planning consists of using supply data at multiple levels (ie, national, state, local, etc). Unfortunately, the variation in the allied health workforce means that supply data for these workers is less likely to be easily available. This report compares allied health workforce supply data (including 9 separate occupations) across multiple years…
Virtually all fields of the health workforce have been greatly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Different states and health organizations responded to these challenges using a variety of different strategies and adjustments. The pandemic has also highlighted the need for a strong health workforce. This article summarizes the other articles in the research supplement and…
Nonstandard work arrangements includes overlapping concepts of: 1) contingent work (based on self-employment status, length of work, method of payment, and connection to employer), 2) alternative work (ie, temporary agency worker, on-call worker, contract company worker, and independent contractor), and 3) electronically-mediated work (sometimes referred to as “gig work”). Between 1995 and 2015 the healthcare…
Studies have shown that wage disparities exist across race and ethnicity within selected health care occupations. These wage disparities negatively affect the industry’s ability to recruit and retain a diverse workforce in varying fields. This article aims to determine whether wage disparities by race and ethnicity persist across health care occupations and whether disparities vary across…
