Reach Out's Monthly Update

Don't miss the full version in your inbox each month. Click here!

This month we’re focused on a topic that is critical to the health and well being of everyone in the Inland Empire: the dire shortage of healthcare workers. This includes doctors and nurses, of course, but the demand for lab techs and physical therapists, phlebotomists and home health aides is escalating as our workforce dwindles too.?

Reach Out’s mission is focused on the health of our local community, so I hope you’ll read this month’s blogs and posts with an eye toward how you might become more involved in helping us achieve this important objective. If you work in the schools, you might consider making an introduction to our healthcare pathways program to help inspire students to choose healthcare careers. Or if you work in local government, perhaps you can help rally funding and legislation around efforts to support bringing more medical training and incentives to our area.

Warmly, Diana Fox

It isn’t hard to find evidence of the ongoing crisis in healthcare. This year saw strikes across the industry, with Kaiser Permanente nurses, ER technicians, and pharmacists participating in a three-day strike Oct. 4-6 that resulted in a 21% raise in wages over the next four years. CVS and Walgreens saw a similar walkout with working conditions cited as the cause. In fact, twenty-two separate healthcare strikes were reported this year in the United States, all of them citing staffing and concern for reduced patient care as the reasons.

Learn more about how this shortage affects our local area, and more importantly, the work that’s being done to help address it.

Read Now →

Given the shortage of healthcare workers in the Inland Empire, providing students with early exposure to the wealth of opportunities in this field is likely to help offset the shortage in the future. In a previous blog post, we discussed this shortage with experts who agreed that filling the pipeline early is the only sustainable way to combat the crisis we’re currently facing.?

Providing kids the opportunity to understand the full range of available health care careers early gives them more choices as they make decisions about their future through the high school years. This is especially important for kids from diverse backgrounds who may not feel “seen” in the current healthcare system and therefore hadn’t considered the field for themselves.

Read Now →

Solving the health workforce shortage by exposing kids early on

Why is there a shortage of healthcare workers in California's Inland Empire?

Reach Out’s Healthcare Work Based Learning team builds comprehensive workforce education and exposure pipelines that integrate with K-12 curriculums to help kids learn about potential health careers beyond those they may already know about. Each school or district’s program is structured specifically to integrate with existing schedules, curriculums, and needs of their specific program.?

Our Health Pathways programs include a range of informational activities and experiences geared toward introducing students to the healthcare field.

• Speakers from diverse backgrounds and professional paths?
• Site visits to clinics and hospitals to offer a view beyond speakers and textbooks
• Internships to get hands-on immersion into a career field
• College visits to help students learn what kinds of grades and scores they might need, and work on building extracurricular items that might make them more competitive when it’s time to apply?
• Soft skills training including mock interviews, resume advice, help with writing emails and making professional phone calls, and networking
• Conferences: Reach Out holds an annual one-day conference to expose students to a selection of speakers and career fields
• Partner network to tailor truly individualized learning opportunities for each studentLearn more →

Partner Spotlight:

Health Career Connection

Health Career Connection is a national organization serving over 400 students annually. They focus on working with college students from underrepresented, under-resourced, and low-income backgrounds to help them make critical choices about their futures. HCC provides hands-on experiences in paid internships along with mentorship and soft-skills assistance to identify authentic health careers for each individual.

The organization has been working with Reach Out for almost 20 years, creating a full continuum of health pathways for students coming out of the Inland Empire. Founder/CEO Jeff Oxendine states, “One success story we love to share is that of Dr. Evita Limon-Rocha, who is a well-respected pediatric psychiatrist with Kaiser, working in the Inland Empire. She grew up locally, went to UC Riverside, and did an internship at Reach Out under the mentorship of Diana Fox. She learned there what advocacy really is, and how that can affect community health.”

Learn more →