Another Voice: We need to diversify our health care workforce. Here's how to do it.

Our region badly needs dramatic improvements in the supply and deployment of qualified and more culturally diverse health care workers. To compensate for the shortage of therapists, health care employers can consider creating subclinical roles, like navigators, mental health aides or peer support specialists, enabling clinicians to focus on direct patient care. Other best practices to consider include hosting work-and-learn and tuition support arrangements, where employees can skill up while working. To accomplish this, education providers need to collaborate more closely with employers to plan across tiers of education and map out accelerated education paths that don't repeat coursework while embedding valuable work experience along the way. Accelerating time to a master's degree requires multiple tiers of education providers to crosswalk curriculum and map out how learners move along and finance their multiple bites at the education apple to minimize student debt and time to degree. We need more equitable solutions to ensure that those entering the health care workforce not only serve these diverse populations but are themselves representative of the communities in which they work. Studies have shown that a culturally competent workforce leads to better patient outcomes, as many patients may be reticent to communicate candidly with their health care provider when there are language or cultural differences. Encouraging diverse communities to consider careers in health care, or mental/behavioral health specifically, involves generating awareness for job opportunities, while providing a clear line of sight to learners on how best to attain credentials, including developing interpersonal as well as technical skills. The time is now to reexamine licensure requirements and whether they place undue burden on aspiring workers by requiring excessive unpaid work experience. For example, to provide therapy as a licensed clinical social worker some states require 3,000 unpaid direct patient care hours. While no one argues that this work experience is valuable, how realistic is it for someone to suspend a year of earnings to gain these patient care hours? By contrast, in allied health roles, which comprise 65% of the industry's workers and predominantly women, we expect graduates to gain their experience unpaid. This model may have worked in the past, but as the younger population base in the U.S. continues to shrink, we rely more on adults to enter the health care workforce, and few adults can afford to suspend paychecks and work for free to obtain experience.