Colorado has announced an ambitious statewide initiative to invigorate its flagging nursing home workforce, which has been rocked by a steady stream of defections and resignations during the pandemic.

Officials unveiled the Care Forward Colorado Program on Thursday. It will invest $26 million of federal COVID stimulus funding over the next two years. The funds will guarantee free schooling for students interested in becoming certified nursing assistants, emergency medical technicians, pharmacy technicians, phlebotomy technicians, medical assistants or dental assistants.

Colorado will provide free education to thousands of students across healthcare jobs as it tries to fill dire worker shortages for nursing home aides, EMTs and other critical positions.

It joins California, which recently unveiled a plan to use COVID stimulus grants to get its own novel workforce reinvigoration program off the ground.

Under California’s new Gateway-In Project, a three-year pipeline program will actively promote, recruit, train, and provide wrap-around services and retention incentives for thousands of new certified nursing assistants and home health aides across the state of California. The LeadingAge initiative was awarded a $25 million-plus state grant.

Rural provider boost

Colorado’s Care Forward nursing education program was created through legislation supported by a bipartisan group of lawmakers during the last legislative session and signed into law by Gov. Jared Polis (D).

Proponents say the new program is one way the state is working to close the workforce gap, particularly in rural regions.

“There’s upward mobility in these careers as well as a steady living,” Polis said. “We only will increase our healthcare needs as our population grows older, and we want to make sure we have the caregivers and the people with the right training to take care of everybody.”

Observers said the novel program has the potential to reach more than 4,000 students — still a far cry from the 54,000 lower-wage healthcare jobs that need to be filled by 2026, according to a 2021 report from Mercer, a human resources consulting company.

It’s a good start, said Doug Farmer, president and CEO of the Colorado Health Care Association.

“The solution to our healthcare worker shortage needs to be multifaceted,” Farmer told McKnight’s Long-Term Care News Friday. “This new program will help with part of that solution by removing the barriers to entry and potentially attracting more people to the profession.”

In particular, Farmer pointed out, the program has the potential to bring more CNAs to long-term care. “Those CNAs become the next generation of caregivers to grow into LPNs and RNs,” he noted. “We need to grow caregivers across the spectrum.”

Free training for two years

The Care Forward Colorado program will be available at 19 community colleges and area technical colleges. The free nursing education will be available to students beginning this fall through 2024.

“I think this type of program helps the kind of workers that are needed in long-term care,” Farmer added. “Our challenge is that we need to grow the future workforce, but also attract and retain the current workforce.

He stressed the need for the state’s nursing homes to continue attracting a proportionate amount of funding as they do workers in the years to come.

“In addition to programs like these, we need Medicaid funding increases in order to keep up with the market demand for employees,” he said, pointing out that between 2020 and 2021, the industry experienced a 20% increase in the cost of nursing personnel. During the same timeframe, facilities’ Medicaid rates rose only 3%. “The gap between cost and reimbursement is growing wider by the day.”

More than 2,000 people working in Colorado nursing homes have left the industry since the start of the pandemic, forcing some homes to stop accepting new residents and straining care for those already living in them.

On August 17, a Colorado Springs nursing home became the latest in the state to announce it was closing its doors, citing pandemic-related staff shortages, increased supply costs and insufficient reimbursement.