Partnerships help health care workers upgrade their skills
By Matthew Dembicki, Published March 4, 2010

The health care industry’s struggles to find enough properly trained nurses and allied health care workers are well known. But providing incumbent frontline workers in the field with opportunities to upgrade their skills and for career advancement needs more focus.

That was the message coursing through the a two-day conference this week in Washington, D.C., that examined how community colleges and industry partners are working together to offer career paths and training to frontline health care workers, who include medical assistants (MAs), health educators, laboratory technicians, substance counselors and home health aides.

Frontline health care workers typically receive little or no training from peers and often feel that their contributions to the workplace are not recognized, which in turn can lead to high turnover and increased costs, according to Jobs for the Future (JFF), which organized the conference.

The quality of frontline workers and their job satisfaction is prompting some health care organizations to rethink how to retain workers and to look at new ways to offer professional development. In some cases, partnerships and programs have been developed out of particular challenges confronting organizations.

In Massachusetts, many of the patients that the East Boston Neighborhood Heath Center serves are immigrants. About 45 percent of its patients prefer to speak a language other than English. But even with more than 20 interpreters on staff, the center could not keep up with demand, said Liliana Silva, vice president of education and training at the center.

Many of the center’s frontline workers—who constitute 40 percent of the staff—live in the neighborhood and were already bilingual, so the center decided to train those employees as auxiliary interpreters. In selecting its partners to develop the program, the center examined where most of those workers received training for their jobs—Bunker Hill Community College (BHCC).

“Just because someone is bilingual doesn’t mean they have the skills to serve as medical interpreters,” Silva said.

The center created its own training center on its campus to allow workers—many of whom were initially intimidated by taking college courses—to provide a familiar and comfortable learning environment and to reduce time to get to class, Silva said. BHCC developed the program—which is focused on MAs—and brought it on site. Workers who complete the program are certified as auxiliary interpreters.

The course—which to date has graduated 28 employees—consists of classroom training once a week, along with work-based learning activities, such as job shadowing. Workers who complete the class remain in their current jobs but serve as interpreters as needed.

But those workers have an edge when an opportunity for advancement arises.

“That person goes to the top of the list,” Silva said.

Workers taking the course also receive a stipend when they complete it. But the center this spring is adding a carrot for those who take the training: They will receive a 5 percent salary increase.

Click here to see a brief interview with McCorry. 

BHCC is working with the center to develop an advanced-level medical interpreter course that will cover prescriptions, dosages and clinical disorders, among other topics, noted Laurie Kelly McCorry, associate dean of allied health at BHCC.

In Washington State, the Virginia Mason Medical Center had been struggling with hiring enough MAs to meet demand when it teamed with Renton Technical College (RTC) to develop a pathway for the center’s clinical service representatives to train to become MAs.

The center tested a nine-month program that yielded 28 new MAs, but it felt that placing those students in their clinicals meant their departments were short-staffed for too long, said Erin Reid, the center’s project manager. So the partners developed a training model that paired the workers with MAs who served as their coaches.

RTC also altered its traditional MA program—which requires 30 hours of classroom time per week for a year—by reducing classroom time to four hours a week and stretching the curriculum over 16 months to prevent burnout. Department managers have agreed to release participating employees at least four hours a week to participate in the program and for the 168 hours each employee needs to complete a required externship, according to an outline of the program.

Click here to see a brief interview with Stephen-Selby.

“Employee learners”—as program officials call them—are individually assessed for their learning styles and provided information and help on managing time, taking tests and navigating the education system, said Heather Stephen-Selby, dean of allied heath at RTC.

“It helps us figure out where their strengths and deficits are and how to build around them,” she said.

As with the BHCC program, the RTC/Virginia Mason program helps employees develop confidence to pursue educational and career goals, Stephen-Selby said.

The colleges featured at the conference participated in JFF’s Jobs to Careers program, a national initiative to support the career development of frontline health care workers by blending education and training.