Healthcare Education and Workforce

Education in Healthcare: The health care system has been characterized with several issues in the recent past including increased costs, poor patient outcomes, shortage in the number of health workers across every category, and under-utilization of health workers. While lack of access to care and increased demand for health care choices are also major issues in this sector, workforce issues will continue to have tremendous impacts on health care delivery.

According to the findings of a recent report, dysfunction in private and public health workforce policy and infrastructure contributes to vulnerabilities for health workers and puts the health of the nation at risk (Kreitzer, Kligler & Meeker, 2009). In addition, the current health care system consist inequities and misrepresentations that have continued to affect health workforce. Health workforce is mainly influenced by the current system of healthcare education, which is characterized with certain challenges. The modern education in healthcare deters younger generations from entering the health profession.

This occurs in various ways including decreased access to education, dangerous working environments, debt, and compensation issues. Furthermore, there is a lack of national leadership and arrangement among various academic, accrediting, and licensure agencies. These factors combine to contribute to inadequacy of the health workforce due to the shortage of professionals such as nurses. In light of the increase in diversity and aging, there is a great need for more health workers to address the ever-growing health needs of the public.

Health care education does not encourage the entrance of more people into this profession, which contributes to the need for more staff. As compared to other professions, health care is the most under-staffed sector with a great need for more workers. The lack of adequate staffing to meet the ever-growing health needs of the population in turn affects the quality of health care delivery. Actually, there is a huge number of patients who need care services than can be met by the current health care workers.

As a result, health care workers tend to be over-worked and fatigued, which leads to inability to provide high-quality care services. The lack of enough health workers is one of the major factors resulting in poor patient outcomes because of the huge tasks that the minimal numbers of staff have to handle on a daily basis.

Therefore, it is important to undertake effective reforms in health care education in order to encourage more people to enter the profession and increase the number of health workers as well as improve the quality of health care delivery. One of the major ways to reform health care education is to continue subsidizing it in order to expand academic opportunities to potential students. This initiative should be accompanied by increased awareness of the numerous available educational opportunities in this profession.

Subsidizing initiatives should not only focus on community colleges but also focus on helping student borrowers through provision of guaranteed federal student loans. This subsidy will not only help in encouraging more people to enter the profession but also increase staffing to address the huge demand for care services. The other important measure involves curriculum reform measures in order to health workers to be adequately prepared in addressing the current health needs.

Based on the increased demand for care services and worker shortages, health care work should be redesigned to maximize licensure, talent, and efficiency in order to enhance staff.