The University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health recently became one of only four academic institutions in the United States to receive a federal grant for the establishment of a center to study health workforce needs.

Created through a three-year $750,000 award from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), Bureau of Health Professions, the Illinois Center for Health Workforce Studies is headed by Judith Cooksey, MD, MPH. Faculty from each of the six UIC health professions schools are engaged in research projects at the center. The first two such centers were established in 1997 at the University of California at San Francisco and the State University of New York at Albany. In fall 1998, HRSA funded new centers at UIC and the University of Washington. UIC’s proposal probably received a boost from the UIC University Health Sciences Center’s long-standing commitment to preparing students for the health professions and interest in evolving professional practice roles, Cooksey believes. UIC leaders, including Vice Chancellor for Health Services R.K. Dieter Haussmann and several of the health professions college deans, have participated in national forums on workforce issues.

The new center will focus much of its work on study of health workforce supply, demand, and distribution in Illinois. The professions being targeted are allied health (occupational therapy and physical therapy), dentistry, nursing, medicine, public health, and pharmacy. Bernard J. Turnock, MD, MPH, of the SPH’s Community Health Sciences Division, is leading the analysis of the public health workforce. Research will range from descriptive studies to analyses that examine the influence of market and other factors on professional practice. Such factors include managed care, health systems change, education and training policies, and revisions of health care financing and regulation._A key priority for HRSA and the center will be identifying ways to improve underserved areas’ and communities’ access to health professionals.

"Research in workforce issues has been modest, with most studies taking a national-level perspective, in part because national data were all that was available," Cooksey says. "The state-level focus represents a substantial change and recognizes that better information at the state and local levels may allow testing of local interventions to improve the effective supply of health professionals."

"For the last fifteen years, Congress has asked HRSA to report to it on the status of the nation’s health workforce," Cooksey continues. "To do this, HRSA needs ongoing research addressing a wide range of issues. For example, there have been major concerns about shortages of nurses, an oversupply of specialty-trained physicians, inadequate numbers of all health professionals trained in geriatric care, and limited access to dentists in poor communities." The last is particularly important in Illinois: there has been a marked reduction in the number of dental graduates due to downsizing of dental school classes and the closure of two of the state’s four dental schools (Loyola and Northwestern).

The center has already begun to identify relevant state data for analysis and is developing working relationships with state agencies responsible for data collection and maintenance. These include the Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE), and the Departments of Professional Regulation, of Public Health, and of Employment Security.

"Our office has a history of looking at workforce issues and trying to tie them to program review," says Donna Corriveau, PhD, assistant director of academic affairs for the IBHE and a member of the center’s advisory council. "The center is going to be able to take the analysis to the next level, and this will further enhance our own work. We’ll use the center’s findings to evaluate our current policies and modify them if the trends are different from what we’ve found [in the past]. This is going to be a very useful project."

To broaden access to the findings and information it generates, the center is developing a website on which its reports will be posted.

Contributed by Rick Asa