Meeting Summary
INCREASING CAREER
OPPORTUNITIES IN NURSING
AND ALLIED HEALTH
IN THE LOS ANGELES AREA:
A Strategic Discussion
Welcome and Purpose
1. Dr. Robert Ross, The California Endowment
 California is facing a nursing and allied heath shortage. In L.A. County, we will need 2,600 new
nurses trained per year to keep up with current demand. In addition, demand is high for pharmacists
and other allied health professionals.
 The list of 10 fastest growing jobs includes eight that provide less than a living wage. Coupled with
the cost of housing, we are creating a community of poverty.
 The California Endowment supports your efforts to create career opportunities.
2. Supervisor Gloria Molina
 What is required to solve the problem of eliminating waiting lists for nursing programs? Is it changing
standards, recruitment and retention, increasing faculty, better pathways? We are facing challenges
such as the baby boomers aging and health care costs increasing.
 This group should develop a plan for what we need to do to overcome the challenges, as we have
been talking about it for a long time.
3. Assemblymember Hector De La Torre
 Career technical education and vocational education are issues that have bipartisan support in the
legislature. Assemblymember De La Torre is part of a “Teacher’s Caucus” including legislators such
as Mark Wieland, Jack Scott, and Betty Garnett that is developing consensus on a package of career
technical educational legislation.
 According to a study by the Public Policy Institute of California, by 2025 the state will experience a
shortage of skilled workers of almost 10 million skilled workers while having 10 million unemployed,
unskilled individuals. Let us start taking steps today to match those people to those jobs. We need
your ideas to fulfill our state’s future workforce needs.
4. Comments
 We have enormous vacancy rates coupled with demand for new people. We can leave jobs unfilled,
continue to important people from other countries, or train our own. However, we have the challenge
of addressing capacity issues.
Health Care Barriers
1. Dr. Joanne Spetz, UCSF Center for California Health Care Workforce Studies
 People who want to be nurses face several barriers, including preparing to apply, getting into a
program, surviving the program, passing the NCLEX licensing exam and surviving the first job.
 To address these barriers, solutions include making prerequisites available, increasing nursing
program spaces, providing financial support, providing mentoring and case management to students,
providing NCLEX preparation and improving the workplace.
2. Comments
 In community colleges, a tension exists between increasing capacity with budget deficits due to costs
of operating nursing and allied health programs.
Academic Barriers
1. Dr. Shelley Weston, Office of School Redesign, Los Angeles Unified School District
 Research tells us that the majority of communities are at or below poverty level; students in the K-12
system are not aware of the options, often leave out of frustration, and need to be connected to
learning; and mentors are needed.
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Small themed schools/small schools allow students to flourish by developing relationship with adults
over time, providing relevance to a real world area of interest, and rigorous teaching and learning with
real world application.
The challenges include reculturing schools and the community, establishing a level of learning for all
students, creating/monitoring interactive programs, developing connections with families, smooth
transitions with articulated coursework and internships, and meaningful use of technology.
2. Lurelean Gaines, Department of Nursing, East Los Angeles College
 Students face barriers, such as high school counselors not knowing about the profession, the need
for prerequisites, grade inflation, financial aid requiring coursework of at least 12 units balanced with
working full-time, and the need for emotional support and case management.
 Colleges face barriers, such providers paying more than a faculty position.
 Partnerships can provide solutions, such as scholarships and hospitals teaming up with schools,
3. Comments
 While nursing programs are the poster children of community colleges, they face significant barriers
such as the financial burden of educating students, providing emotional support to students and
adequate pay for faculty.
Model Career Preparation Program
1. Dr. Michael Paul, Lehman College-CUNY
 CUNY on the Concourse created community-based workforce education in the Bronx by sharing
space with a consortium of agencies including unions, CUNY, and state and local agencies.
 Lehman College created a higher education continuum for incumbent workers, focusing on
assessment of basic skills, contextualized remediation, bridge to college including a cohort-based
model that front-loads coursework, and finally the degree program focusing on adults over 25 years.
As a result, these students are highly successful.
 Among the workforce implications, the retention rates of retrained and upgraded incumbent workers
are substantially higher as they know the rigors of the job and work environment already.
Template for Partnership and Determining Solutions
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The Template for Partnership was briefly reviewed, which included potential strategies to address the
barriers discussed by the presenters.
Meeting participants were pre-assigned to one of four breakout groups: 1) Increasing Access;
2) Increasing Capacity; 3) Successful Completion, Job Placement and Retention; and 4)
Collaboration. Each group was asked to review the strategies, provide comments for implementing
the strategies, and provide suggestions for potential project collaborations based on three criteria:
1) Multiple agencies involvement, 2) Doable projects, and 3) Achievable in the next 12 months.
Based on the common threads from the presentations and discussions, meeting participants were
asked to sign up for three short-term workgroups: 1) Legislative Solutions; 2) Funding Initiatives and
3) Educational/Employer Training Programs.
Working Lunch
1. Dr. Bruce Chernof, L.A. County Department of Health Services
 The CUNY on the Concourse is a model program, which succeeds in New York City because of
factors such as the highly unionized environment.
 The department is committed to increasing career opportunities for its workforce through its
partnership with L.A. County-SEIU Health Care Workforce Development Program.
2. James Lott, Hospital Association of Southern California
 We are facing a looming problem, with one graduate produced as three nurses retire
 Congressional representatives such as Diane Watson and Juanita Millender-McDonald expressed
interest in supporting an interesting idea coming from the group, such as a demonstration project.
 In order to influence the statewide health care reform process, the group should be prepared to
impact a super-conference committee formed to decide which legislative proposal to pass in
June/July 2007. Workforce issues may be a tough sell given competing priorities, but the opportunity
exists to form an alliance between SEIU, the hospital industry and the educational community.
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