News Release

Dr. Jennifer Craft Morgan Addresses Congress On Healthcare Leadership Regarding Frontline Healthcare Workers

April 8, 2010

Jennifer Craft Morgan, PhD, Associate Director for Research at the UNC Institute on Aging and Principal Investigator, UNC Evaluation of the Jobs to Careers Program, recently presented a paper at the Second Annual Forum on Advances in Healthcare Management Research, part of the American College of Healthcare Executives 2010 Congress on Healthcare Leadership. "Growing Your Own Frontline Health and Healthcare Workforce: Promising Practices and Innovations", co-authored by graduate research assistants Emmeline Chuang and Kendra Jason, and co-principal investigator Thomas R. Konrad, PhD, was selected competitively from abstracts submitted to the American College of Healthcare Executives.

The paper is abstracted as follows: Population aging is driving an increase in the demand for healthcare services much of which is delivered by six million frontline health and healthcare workers across healthcare sectors. The majority of these jobs have low educational requirements, heavy workloads and few benefits. Due to high turnover of entry-level jobs, worker shortages in mid-level jobs and the projected increase in demand for these workers as the population ages, employers are looking to partner to develop their own incumbent workers to fill gaps in the workforce. Engaged healthcare executives are vital to solving these problems. Using data from the evaluation of the Jobs to Careers: Promoting Work-based Learning for Quality Care program, this paper seeks to identify the dimensions of systems change in employers needed to prepare workers for career development within the employer, to provide a platform of basic skills and competencies and to break down the barriers to such development. Data come from seventeen partnership case studies which include data from key informants representing healthcare employers including 13 CEOs/CFOs, 20 Human Resource Managers, 52 managers. Interviews were audio-taped, transcribed, and coded for themes using NVivo 7.0. Findings are organized into four dimensions of key systems change: creating meaningful linkages between educational institutions and employers, changes in organizational culture to foster learning at all ranks, innovations in HR policies and practices and accommodations for learning within the work process. Examples of promising practices, the business case for investing in such changes and the perceived benefits of these approaches will be discussed. NOTE: This paper was funded, in part, by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation using data from the UNC Evaluation of the Jobs to Careers Program.