Arizona Western College, Sunset Health, and Onvida Health gathered at the AWC Yuma Campus Wednesday morning, July 29, to celebrate a $150,000 grant from Arizona Complete Health aimed at tackling workforce shortages in health care.
The grant, which will be distributed through the AWC Foundation, will be split evenly amongst the three organizations to assist their endeavors in providing clinical healthcare training and improving access to skilled care for local residents.
At AWC, that support looks like scholarships that will increase access to high-demand, high-wage health care programs. Dr. Reetika Dhawan, president of the college, noted that they’re looking into expanding and creating new programs.
“We are looking at surgical tech partnering with Onvida, partnering with Sunset,” she said. “We are looking, also, [into] expanding our program — whether it's nursing, whether it's medical assistant, whether it's a CNA program. How can we provide opportunities for our students?”
Sunset Health will be utilizing its portion of the grant to support clinical preceptor stipends and provide tuition assistance. Preceptors are experienced practitioners who provide supervision during clinical practice.
Dr. Saika Somjee, senior director of clinical operations and education at Sunset, explained that they established a preceptor program after she noticed that Yuma nurses weren’t finding clinical rotation opportunities. The nurses would attend school online but then have to drive far away to other places like Phoenix.
“Until now, Sunset has been supporting these preceptors in different ways without any kind of funding from outside,” she said. “And now to get this funding for the first time to actually support this preceptor program is like our first milestone and a success that we feel to support this program.”
She noted that the program provides robust training for future nurse practitioners and physician assistants, who will give “high quality health care to our community, so actually, it’s a win-win.”
For Onvida Health, the grant will provide additional rapid upskilling and credentialing opportunities.
Justin Farren, senior vice president and chief strategy officer at Onvida, said they already partner with AWC on many initiatives and this grant will fund more of those endeavors as they build “the health care workforce of tomorrow.”
“We collectively identify, ‘Where do we have workforce gaps going forward?’” he said. “‘How can we join hands and link arms to actually create pathways so that the future of our community doesn’t suffer from having a shortage of health care workforce?’”
Dhawan, Somjee and Farren agreed that their respective organizations collaborate by each contributing what they do best. They regularly step in to fulfill each other’s goals as they aim to meet community needs.
“Like when the hospital started their residency program, they didn't have outpatient at that time, so Sunset stepped in and we gave our outpatient pediatrics to be the first preceptor with them — otherwise, the residency program would not have come in place,” Somjee said. “... It’s not like we are competing against each other. We have to put those pieces together and move forward because then we're going to give them to the community. Because if you start moving apart and just thinking, ‘Oh, we have to do it ourselves,’ then it's never going to happen.”
This continuing collaboration to address workforce shortages and aid community is precisely what Arizona Complete Health was looking for.
Maria Chavoya, regional manager of community affairs for Arizona Complete Health, explained that their top priority for this year was the workforce through access to healthcare, food, nutrition and housing.
In meetings with stakeholders, she described that they discussed what might help communities grow.
“For me, keeping people in our community is number one,” she said. “We want to keep all the people that live here, have grown up here — like myself — to stay in this community and to help grow the community. So this fell just right in place. It was focused on partnerships, workforce health, access to health.”
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Reporting for this article is supported by a grant from the Arizona Local News Foundation.
Note: Arizona Western College is KAWC's license holder; Onvida is an underwriter for KAWC.
