Growing Our Own”: $1.3M Plan to Train Local Healthcare Workers

Hi, I’m Sarah Tober, executive director of the La Plata Economic Development Alliance, where we believe in the power of partnership and economic growth to drive meaningful change in our communities. Together we can shape a thriving, resilient La Plata County. We are proud to present this edition of Community Insights.

Southwest Colorado’s healthcare crisis isn’t what you might expect. The challenge isn’t merely about hiring doctors and nurses in a rural area. Local healthcare also struggles to fill support roles to operate healthcare offices. From front desk staff to medical assistants.

The positions that we are struggling the most to fill are a lot of the support positions. Anything from patient experience specialists, which is our front desk position to medical assistant, dental assistant, and then even onto some of our other positions like dental hygiene, our harder to fill than others and have a lot more turnover.

Healthcare providers say they’re losing workers to rising costs, housing shortages, and longer hours due to staffing shortages.

One thing that we have heard from our healthcare industry partners is that the cost of living here is so high that it’s really difficult, even for household of two physicians to find housing that they can even afford. In Durango,

To address the issue, access Health System received a $1.3 million Colorado State opportunity. Now grant and it has partnered with the Project Rural Upskill Network, also called Project Run, a professional certificate program to build and retain a local health industry workforce.

We’re realizing that we really need to look at the long term and thinking about growing our own workforce.

Recently, Fort Lewis College started a medical assistant program to give support staff the training to grow within the healthcare industry.

If you start out as a patient experience specialist at Axis, it would be good to know that you could do a little bit of training, perhaps get into maybe a medical assistant program, say at Fort Lewis, which just started one, and then within a couple years as you’re working, be able to move up into a different position.

The Healthcare Workforce Pipeline program aims to place 150 people in healthcare jobs with advancement opportunities through training at Fort Lewis College.

We are hoping through this program that we can place a 150 people in jobs, and that can be by upskilling or like I had talked about, moving from like a front desk position into an MA position through some training.

While Access Health received the grant, the program is a collaborative effort between several organizations, access Health System Project Run. Fort Lewis College in the Southwest Colorado Education Collaborative, all work together to coordinate solutions. The Southwest Education Collaborative starts with informing the region’s high school students about available health industry jobs to entice them to choose health career pathways. While in School,

Access Health System was the applicant for the grant, we know that what we want to do with the grant is we want to make our organization one that has the capacity to allow people to explore work in healthcare. Here at Access Health System, the heavy lift of the work is what Project runs. The Alliance and Southwest Education Collaborative have partnered to do, which is a lot of working one-on-one with our program participants.

As a combined effort, healthcare industry partners are building local solutions to employee shortages rather than competing for workers from urban areas. We’re proud to present Community Insights powered by the Local News Network and sponsored by the La Plata Economic Alliance. The Community Insights Mission fosters a stronger and more connected community in La Plata County and beyond. For more information about this and other stories, visit Durango Local News. Thank you for watching this edition of Community Insights. I am Sadie Smith.