New Haven Independent

Jones (pictured), 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.” Click here to hear more of his upbeat philosophy.

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. Click here to read it.

“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.”