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CWEALF In The News
He Saw The Job Of The Future
by Melinda Tuhus
July 08, 2008
Kyle Jones knows an opportunity when he
sees it — so he’s training for a health care career that’s
in great demand, and his employer’s paying the tab.
Jones, of New Haven, graduated from Career High
School. He has worked at Yale-New Haven Hospital for more
than five years as an environmental services aide (what used
to be called “housekeeping”). He’s working through his prerequisites
at Gateway Community College using the hospital’s Tuition
Reimbursement plan, which pays more than 85 percent of educational
expenses of up to $3,800 for full-time employees (half that
for half-timers).
Communities throughout the state are wrestling
with how to address a worsening shortage of health-care workers,
not just in the field that gets the most attention, nursing.
Jones will then study radiography. Because
that’s one of a handful of careers with a shortage of qualified
workers in the state, the hospital will then send up to $6,000
a year to the institution where he’ll study to help him complete
his education. In return, he must promise to continue working
at YNHH for at least two years.
Indeed, the program reflects the challenge facing
communities throughout the state, which are wrestling with
how to address a worsening shortage of health-care workers,
not just in the field that gets the most attention, nursing.
Jones said learning that the hospital would
largely pay for additional training was one of the things
that attracted him to work there. “Actually, I think everybody
should take advantage of it,” Jones said one recent evening
while taking a break from work. “It’s a sweet deal. You know,
a lot of people want to go back to school and can’t afford
to, but this opens the door for you. I like the way it’s set
up because you have to take the first step.”
Pat Worthy, manager of workforce diversity in
the Human Resources Department of the hospital, explained
that nursing, respiratory therapy and diagnostic imaging are
the jobs most in need of workers, so employees pursuing those
can take advantage of both tuition reimbursement and loan
forgiveness. Those employees wishing to prepare for any other
jobs available in the hospital can participate in the former
but not the latter program. “For example,” Worthy said, “if
someone wants to move from housekeeping to patient care associate,
they must be a Certified Nursing Assistant,” and they could
get reimbursement from the hospital for that training. Both
programs require participants to be coded (permanent) employees
in good standing.
She said about 400 workers out of the hospital’s
workforce of 6,700 participate in the two programs. While
that might sound low, she pointed out that thousands of people
come to work fully trained so don’t need the programs. She
added that YNHH will pay for whoever is qualified and wants
to participate.
Worthy noted that some employees — especially
those who’ve been out of school a long time — need extra help
and a dose of self-confidence before tackling college, so
the hospital introduced two other programs a few years ago.
One is called School at Work, in which groups of ten employees
get together for remediation work with coaches for two hours
a week, on work time, for eight months. If employees aren’t
even ready for that, there’s a similar “Pre-School at Work”
program that is more rudimentary.
Worthy herself is a great advertisement for
the hospital’s training programs. She began there 35 years
ago as a unit secretary on a patient care unit. Then she went
for her nursing degree, got additional training in psychiatry
and managed the psych service for some time. “Then I decided
to go into HR, and they sent me back to school again,” she
said, adding that the hospital is a place where many workers
come to stay, even though they may move around a lot within
job categories.
Alice Pritchard, executive director of the Connecticut
Women’s Education and Legal Fund (CWEALF for short), was an
adviser on a state workforce development study in 2007.
“We’re working really hard to talk about something
other than nursing,” she said. “It’s the largest need and
monopolizes the conversation and the state is putting a lot
of emphasis on that, but there are many other shortages.”
Pritchard said one concern is what’s called
the education and training pipeline. “All the disciplines
seem to have the same core problems — not enough faculty;
they can’t expand their facilities; there are people who are
interested but not qualified or well-prepared to succeed in
the field.”
She added that one of the challenges around
allied health — which is defined in the study as every occupation
but doctors and administrators — is that there’s a heavy emphasis
on math and science, “and students aren’t graduating from
public schools with a good foundation; or they had one math
and one science class 20 years ago. We’ve been doing some
work with nurses’ aides who want to go to nursing school and
they all have to do an incredible amount of work in math and
English - some are immigrants. People think you can go from
being a nurse aide to an LPN [licensed practical nurse] to
RN [registered nurse], but it’s false. Each one is so specific
that you almost have to start over. There are not really career
pathways.
Another piece is “employer engagement” — what
YNHH is doing, and many other employers in the health field
do as well, like the Hospital of St. Raphael and Hill Health
Center. “There’s a concern that neither kids nor adults have
a broad understanding of all the health careers available
to them beyond doctors and nurses,” Pritchard continued. “If
they don’t want to do patient care, they can do laboratory
work, and we have huge shortages in that field. If they like
working with older people but don’t want to be an aide, they
can do physical therapy at a rehab hospital, and there are
shortages there.”
To address some of these critical health care
shortages in Connecticut will take creativity, money and commitment
by both institutions and individual employees.
Kyle Jones has made that commitment. With a
6-year-old and a 7-month-old, he says it’s really tough to
combine a full-time job with school. two kids, 6 years, but,
he said, “The sacrifice is worth it in the long run.” .
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