Recently, I reached my year anniversary with the NC Center on the Workforce for Health. As I look back on the past 12 months, I am encouraged by all we have accomplished across our network of partners. The Center continues to operationalize a bold, but important vision of building greater alignment across health workforce initiatives and driving meaningful impact together.
Here are a few highlights that reflect a great deal of hard work since March 2024.

Building a Team to Address Health Workforce Issues
To date, we’ve been able to onboard four positions and secure funding for additional roles, which will bring the Center’s fulltime staff up to eight in the coming months. While we look forward to being more fully staffed, the current team is hard at work operationalizing the Center’s core infrastructure while improving existing workstreams. The current team comes with vast experience in public health, clinical care, health system operations, and post-secondary education policy. We have additional roles to fill and announce in the coming months.

Measuring and Acting on Regional and Statewide Health Workforce Needs

The NC Health Talent Alliance, an initiative of the Center led in partnership with the NC Chamber Foundation and NC AHEC regions collected data from more than 1,000 health facilities and 80 health education programs to measure state and regional needs and opportunities for four high demand positions: registered nurses (RNs), licensed practical nurses (LPNs), certified nurse aides (CNAs), and medical assistants. The data quantifies current shortages, staff turnover, and educational output to drive regional and statewide action directly with employers, educators, workforce entities and others through the nationally developed Talent Pipeline Management framework.

Advancing State Priorities for the Caregiving Workforce
The Caregiving Workforce Strategic Leadership Council released a report detailing 60+ action steps to advance 15 strategies for the nursing, behavioral health, and direct care workforces. The report identified the Center as a coordinating entity to support implementation of those recommendations across state agencies and education partners. To date, we have helped the Sheps Center secure investments in recommendations to improve the behavioral health workforce data infrastructure, convened stakeholders to mobilize action on direct care workforce recommendations, secure funds to initiate a comprehensive rate analysis for direct care services, and analyze priorities on nursing workforce across the Caregiving report and related reports by NC Institute of Medicine

Launching a Centralized Health Workforce Resource Hub
One of the Center’s founding goals was to create a centralized repository for health workforce data, policy information, research, and actionable solutions. In November, we launched our comprehensive online Resource Hub featuring a Data Hub, Policy & Research Hub, and Solutions Playbook. This dynamic resource is designed to foster a two-way exchange of information, making it the go-to destination for stakeholders, policymakers, and journalists.

Building Alignment Across Policy Efforts
In the last 14 months, several partners have released reports on challenges facing healthcare and the workforce. The Center is named in multiple reports, validating the relevance of our efforts and reinforcing the need for persistent collaboration. Reports on nursing, behavioral health, direct care, oral health, and other fields look to the Center to support follow-up action. Those reports include:

• NCIOM Task Force on the Future of the Nursing Workforce
• NC Caregiving Workforce Strategic Leadership Council
• NCIOM Task Force on Oral Health Transformation
• All Ages, All Stages Report by NC DHHS

As we look to the rest of 2025, the Center will expand on what we have accomplished in the past year. Key priorities include:

• Expanding our team of professionals to lead our initiatives and engage with stakeholders.
• Adding new resources to our online hub and encouraging organizations to share their materials.
• Launching our online directory of health workforce stakeholder organizations.
• Continuing to contribute actionable data and information through NC Health Talent Alliance and related analysis

While challenges remain, we’re inspired by the collaboration and dedication of our many partners. We will continue to provide updates on the remarkable work underway and opportunities to contribute to our shared success.