CPCA’s HP-ET Workforce Activities

CPCA is committed to strengthening workforce diversity as a core pillar of its strategic plan, aiming to establish community health centers (CHCs) as employers of choice and community economic engines. As we continue to expand our scope and understanding, one thing is clear – the workforce shortages impact every discipline and almost every profession.

As such, CPCA alongside the Health Resources & Services Administration Bureau of Health Workforce (HRSA BHW) and Primary Care Associations, are working hard to increase health professional training, and share recruitment and retention strategies. One way to do this is by encouraging and facilitating health professional education and training (HP-ET) in our community health centers.

The initiative enhances health centers’ capabilities to recruit, develop, and retain their workforce by exposing health and allied health professions students, trainees, and residents to education and training programs conducted at health centers. CHCs are focused on “growing their own” workforce to develop and diversify current and incoming health professionals. As a result, this helps to strengthen the workforce by retaining staff that are passionate, empathic, and motivated to serve the CHC population long-term.

As a part of CPCA expanding its HP-ET Initiative, we have created several resources as a part of our Promising Practices Library that focus on strategies and professions shared by CHCs. To create these resources, we interview different CHCs across the state to grasp a landscape review of the challenges and successes faced within the workforce. We then use research, data collection and subject matter experts to write, edit and develop these toolkits. CPCA has created documents on preceptor training, affiliation agreements, trainee retention and leveraging community health workers.

We are happy to announce the release of a new Promising Practices document called Growing the Dental Assistant Workforce. This resource highlights promising practices CHCs can leverage to cultivate a robust dental assistant workforce. Gathering together research and real experiences of CHC dental programs, this resource reveals strategies that strengthen the oral health workforce, including establishing career pathways, developing partnerships and exploring the apprenticeship model. CHCs will find several lessons learned by their peers that can serve as a resource in HP-ET planning, development, and implementation.

The document is free to download here at the CPCA Store.