On Wednesday, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky), and co-sponsor Morgan McGarvey (D-Ky), introduced H.R.9812 into the House of Representatives. The bill is looking to tackle the dearth of nurses, nurse aides and more, by incentivising states to develop health care workforce partnerships.

The bill provides grant funds to offset up to 50% of a state appropriation for health care workforce public-private partnerships and scholarships.

The bill is modeled after an approach that’s being taken in Kentucky. For Kentucky, the passage of the bill has been a positive development.

“The statute itself lists 14 health care occupations that are in critical need in Kentucky, and it supplies funding, so that we can match industry donations for both training scholarships and incentive funds,” Leslie Sizemore, associate vice president of workforce and economic development at the Kentucky Council On Postsecondary Education, told Home Health Care News. “The majority of the interest has been in the training scholarships, and we have just recently gone through our very first submission period and award notices. We were able to really impact the potential for developing the workforce in this area.”

Success in Kentucky points to the potential of a federal health care workforce program that is bolstered by collaboration.

Plus, Kentucky isn’t an anomaly. Louisiana recently passed similar legislation, and Florida has a system with a similar mechanism.

Sizemore believes that the public-private partnership aspect, in particular, has been a game changer.

“People have always looked to higher education as really supplying the talent needs that the workforce has to have to continue to work, but we’ve really never capitalized on the industry as being a partner in that,” she said. “For the very first time, we’re pulling together industry partners, government officials and our higher education officials in the same room to say, ‘What do we need to do to make sure that Kentucky has enough resources?”

What’s more, in a March response letter to the U.S. Senate’s request for information regarding solutions to the national health care workforce crisis, the Partnership for Quality Home Healthcare (PQHH) pointed to Kentucky and Florida as blueprints. PQHH also spoke about nationalizing these models.

At the time, PQHH CEO Joanne Cunningham expressed optimism around what she viewed as a true effort to find actionable solutions to the health care workforce crisis.

“It feels different to me,” she previously told HHCN. “It feels like there is some renewed interest and effort to, on a bipartisan basis, work together on creative solutions that leverage all the interest and all the good ideas out there, to see something happen. I’m hopeful and I think this momentum is exciting.”

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