Health Workforce Transformation: For Hospitals

The Health Workforce Transformation Division of COPE Health Solutions helps hospitals, health systems and other health care organizations to grow their workforce from local communities through proven recruitment, education, and retention techniques.

Vision
Increase the number of highly trained nursing, allied health care staff and physicians who are representative of the local community demographics and are pre-screened for a good “fit” to the unique health care organization’s culture and identity.

Health Workforce Transformation Components
Red Shirt Program: High school students are introduced to the healthcare field through college-level mentors. Mentors help them improve school performance to prepare for academic success. Once they turn 18 and enroll in a college or university, “Red Shirts” become eligible to join the Clinical Care Extender program.

Clinical Care Extender Program: Provides top pre-health professional students from local colleges and universities, graduates, seasoned professionals seeking a second careers in health care and re-entering health professionals with a year long clinical internship. Clinical Care Extender interns begin serving alongside health staff and professionals as part of the patient care team. Interns use this experience to decide which of the many careers in health care are for right for them.  Interns are available for hire for entry level positions immediately and become a pipeline to provide the system’s future health care professionals.

Health Professions Training Expansion Program: Creates nurse and allied health education cohorts through contracts with local colleges and universities.  Cohort positions will be filled with those applicants from the pipeline who are the best fit for partner hospitals/health care agencies.  Trainees will commit to work for partner hospitals/health care agencies upon graduation.

Health Professions Re-entry Training Program: Supports the entry/reentry of U.S. licensed and foreign trained health professionals creating a network of licensed, functional and effective health professionals. Trainees will commit to work for partner hospitals/health care agencies upon licensure.

Mentoring and Professional Development Program (MAP): Provides a supportive environment for new graduate nurses and allied-health professionals through an extensive 12-week residency program and preceptor training program. 

Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services (CLAS): Provides services to help hospitals and health systems provide culturally and linguistically appropriate care.  Services provided include a comprehensive assessment of the hospital/health system’s ability to provide culturally & linguistically appropriate care, recommendations based upon findings of the assessment for solutions to eliminate cultural barriers to care, and implementation of interpreter trainings and a health care interpreter program to meet the needs of the hospital/health care system’s diverse patient population.

Return on Investment

• College/University-level volunteer interns provide a minimum of 25-30 Patient Support Full Time Equivalent’s (FTE) that would normally cost a minimum of $575,000-690,000 per year.
  
  
• Through the MAP program, the attrition rate of new nurse graduates after one year at one hospital has fallen by 50% with a nurse cost retention benefit of $1,587,000 after two years.
  
  
• Reduce RN recruitment costs by 72%, saving on average $50,000 per nurse hired through the pipeline.

Looking Forward
COPE Health Solutions is building capacity to bring the Health Workforce Transformation Model to the scale needed to replicate it across the country as a best-practice to cost-effectively address the health workforce shortage we face over the next decade.

For more information on how we can help you provide a Health Solution, please contact
Allen Miller or Phyllis Bushart at 213-259-0245 or by e-mail at amiller@copehealthsolutions.org or Phyllis.Bushart@copeheathsolutions.org.