California Health and Wellness Pathway Program Op-ed
Date: 02/01/20
By: Cassandra Jennings, President & CEO, Greater Sacramento Urban League
While our state's capitol is experiencing a population boom, California is facing a shortage of a variety of healthcare workers. Just last month, Sacramento was cited by Inc’s 2020 Surge Cities list as 10th in the category of job creation and 26th overall. In fact, in 2018 an estimated 27,000 residents flocked to the City of Trees. Unfortunately, according to a healthcare workforce study released last year, California is expected to have more than 4,100 fewer primary care doctors than it needs by 2029.
With this kind of growth in Sacramento and other California cities, healthcare is a primary sector where we should prioritize our investments across this state. Albeit, it's not only a lack of primary care doctors that should have Californians concerned—medical specialists, nurses, home care workers, psychiatrists, and general health workers could be dwindling as well.
That's where it becomes incumbent upon community leaders and the business community to band together and empower Sacramentans with the tools and support necessary to rise to the challenge and meet our workforce demands. The power of business and community partnerships is limitless when it brings together various resources to address our looming healthcare worker shortage.
Just last month, through a collaborative partnership between the Greater Sacramento Urban League (GSUL), Health Net, WellSpace Health and Sacramento City College, we celebrated the graduation of 15 Sacramento health worker students from the newly created Community Health Worker Pathway Program (CHW)—aimed at helping to address the state’s growing healthcare worker shortage. The program provides academic and financial support helping students build skillsets that will allow them to pursue careers as Patient and Health Navigators, Community Health Educators, or Enrollment Specialists. These new graduates are now able to help patients by aiding them in navigating the healthcare system, bridging language and cultural barriers, clarifying medical advice and procedures, providing comfort and emotional support and facilitating access to services.
Organizations coming together and identifying a need is what made this program possible. Supporting these students—inside and outside the classroom—brings us one step closer to closing the healthcare worker gap. We learned this through the California Future Health Workforce Commission and its plan of recommendations to address workforce shortages.
The plan calls for expanding the educational pipeline to recruit more students into healthcare careers such as, mentorship, academic, career and psychosocial support, so that 5,700 low-income and underrepresented minority professionals will be able to join the California health care workforce over the next 10 years.
We definitely have our work cut out for us—as a community here in Sacramento and as a state. However, with initiatives such as the CHW program and partner organizations like Health Net, WellSpace Health and Sacramento City College, I believe we're on the right path to success.
Our plan is to continue to grow this initiative and increase each graduating class, while providing Sacramentans with more access to tools and resources needed to become successful in the workforce.
Addressing our state's healthcare worker shortage will take time, resources and require many different key players to tackle the issue. However, I’m confident that we all share a commitment to preserving our state's status as the fifth largest economy in the world. I'm also confident in the power of Sacramento's endless opportunities for collaboration and community partnerships, to provide our state with the healthcare workforce it needs and deserves. It’s about health equity, health that is founded in human dignity, loving care and fair distribution of resources and power.