Our faculty and staff were asked to support California’s workforce planning for anticipated surges in hospital care due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Through our relationship with Healthforce Center at UCSF, we produced a set of recommendations to surge the workforce, developed staffing ratios and a staffing calculator to determining hiring needs for newly-opened COVID-19 hospitals, developed job action sheets for alternate care sites, developed orientation and training materials for alternate care sites, and collaborated with other state leaders to guide changes in nursing education to ensure that students could gain appropriate clinical experiences and enter the workforce. Our resources are available on the Healthforce Center COVID-19 Health Workforce Surge Planning website.
With supplemental support from the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis, our team is conducting three rapid studies on the COVID-19 workforce response:
- Profiles of Alternate Care Settings. Several states and cities established alternate care sites, in locations such as convention centers and dormitories, to provide sub-acute care for people with SARS-Cov2 infection. We are studying the roles of these sites, their staffing mix, their recruitment and deployment strategies, and their training approaches.
- Community paramedic roles in the COVID-19 response: Community paramedic roles in the COVID-19 response: We are identifying and describing models that communities can use to engage their community paramedic workforce to support local pandemic response.
- Multiple job-holding among long-term care workers: Some front-line workers in long-term care hold multiple jobs because they are unable to support themselves and their families with the low wages and part-time hours of many long-term care jobs. We will use publicly-available data to assess the extent to which long-term care workers hold multiple jobs and the factors associated with multiple job-holding.