Changes Abound
for Health Careers Partnership
New name, new
location, new priorities
December 2004—The
Health Careers Partnership, formerly the Health Careers Institute,
will begin 2005 with a new home and a new set of strategies
for training and placing its students in a local healthcare
market that has changed significantly
over the program’s short life.
The program’s
new strategic focus will reconcile HCP’s flexible market-driven
approach with its long-term commitment to providing employment
training for Phillips residents.
 “HCP
has always provided a unique chance for disadvantaged
clients to enter the medical profession through sponsorship.
This effort will likely grow as a percentage of the
program’s activity, as it’s the core service
whose need has not diminished with market trends.”
—Steve
Cramer, director,
Project
for Pride in Living |
Program administrators at Project for Pride in Living say
they and staff of the Minneapolis Community and Technical
College, which delivers the curriculum and training, have
been busy instituting a response to a strategic direction
adopted by the Phillips Partnership earlier this year. That
document identified key challenges created by HCP’s
rapid transformation from an experiment in grassroots career
training to the largest hospital-based jobs program of its
kind in the nation.
Challenge
The partnership’s evaluation found that the three hospital
partners in HCP – Abbott Northwestern Hospital, Children’s
Hospitals and Clinics, and the Hennepin County Medical Center
– have significantly fewer job openings than in 2000,
when the program was formed in response to a glut of unfilled
medical and support positions. The partner hospitals now are
filling more of those openings with existing staff.
The Health Careers Partnership has also become decentralized.
With coursework shifting from Phillips to downtown Minneapolis
and the transfer of hospital human resource departments out
of Phillips, the “one-stop” opportunity for prospective
enrollees to live, study and work in the same neighborhood
has diminished.
Response
Steve Cramer, director of Project for Pride in Living, said
that HCP will increasingly serve the niche function of promoting
diversity within the healthcare profession. This will involve
intensifying existing outreach to minorities, immigrants and
residents of the Minneapolis Empowerment zone.
“HCP has always provided a unique chance for disadvantaged
clients to enter the medical profession through sponsorship.
This effort will likely grow as a percentage of the program’s
activity, as it’s the core service whose need has not
diminished with market trends.”
He added that this emphasis complements the “soft-skills”
coursework of PPL’s Train to Work program, which has
prepared hundreds of unskilled workers for entry-level jobs.
Strategies for repositioning HCP currently being pursued include
more aggressive tracking of projected job openings at partner
hospitals to focus job-placement efforts and curriculum offerings;
communicating more intensively with healthcare providers and
program staff; continuing the expansion of job placement efforts
among non-hospital employers; and adopting a more responsive
governance structure.
The Phillips Partnership and HCP agree that by drawing on
the program’s historic strengths – long-term commitment
to career-laddering and the Phillips neighborhood, responsiveness
to market needs, and efficient collaboration among its partners
– they can produce continued success over the long term.
|
