The North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS) released a rural health care partnerships toolkit, calling it a resource for leaders in health care organizations, community colleges, and other workforce and educational settings invested in filling the rural health care professionals pipeline.

The toolkit includes “successful models of partnership being leveraged across rural North Carolina to meet local and regional health care workforce needs,” according to a NCCCS press release.

The new resource was created by the Rural Postsecondary Practices Partnership (RP3) , a collaborative group including the NCCCS, the Belk Center for Community College Leadership and Research, EducationNC, and myFutureNC.

Rural communities and health care worker shortages

Community colleges have long been heralded as workforce engines, playing a critical role in addressing workforce needs and graduating qualified workers – including supplying the demand for skilled health care professionals. 

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, “Employment in health care is projected to grow faster than the average for all occupations through 2032 with 1.8 million openings per year.” 

The growing demand is quickly outpacing the ability to fill positions due to talent shortages, burnout among health care workers, and increasing skill demands.

Rural communities particularly feel the brunt of health care worker shortages.

North Carolina’s rural population is the second largest in the country behind Texas. Nearly 50 of the state’s 58 community colleges are considered rural-serving – the largest rural college network in the United States.

About the toolkit

The toolkit highlights numerous collaborative partnerships North Carolina’s rural-serving community colleges are engaged in to meet health care labor market needs. 

These include “cross-sector partnerships involving employers, two-and four-year colleges and universities, K-12 schools and districts, and other community-based organizations,” the press release says.

RP3 identified partnerships and strategies involving more than 35 of North Carolina’s rural-serving community colleges through publicly available information and conversations with college leaders. 

The toolkit lays out four health care workforce opportunities and related partnership strategies, including: 

• Reducing the high costs and logistical complexities of launching and expanding in-demand health care programs,
• Engaging the next generation of health care workers via pathways and programs,
• Supporting students’ success in health care programs and courses by eliminating barrier to entry and completion, and
• Creating seamless pathways for students to continue their health sciences education.

There are over 10 partnership strategies grouped according to the health care workforce opportunity they address. The partnership strategies range from health care providers partnering with colleges to support the growth of in-demand programs by covering or subsidizing faculty salaries to colleges partnering with each other to jointly offer high-cost health care courses.

After each partnership strategy, the toolkit then lists colleges deploying specific strategies and provides additional information about the partnership. There are nearly 50 examples of specific partnerships among the rural-serving institutions. 

The toolkit also explores, in-depth, three specific rural-serving institutions that have used partnership-based strategies to meet local and regional health care workforce needs.

Those spotlights include information about:

• A shared state-of-the-art facility between a community college, a four-year university, and a health care provider,
• A partnership between a health system and community college to develop a pipeline of skilled health care workers,  and
• A partnership with a community college and two local health care facilities to address a community-wide nursing shortage.

“The toolkit reflects how proactively, strategically, and collaboratively our community colleges work with local and regional partners around North Carolina,” Dr. Zach Barricklow, NCCCS associate vice president for strategy and rural innovation and liaison for rural engagement and research at the Belk Center, said. “It also shows the diligence with which our community colleges serve health care employers looking for a qualified workforce.”

Barricklow went on to say that leaders from education and health care are encouraged to share the toolkit and leverage it as a source for ideas, models, and solutions. 

“Don’t reinvent the wheel, perfect it,” he said. “Build off these examples and make them work for your community and context.”

For more information about RP3 or the Rural Healthcare Partnerships Toolkit and to share additional examples of partnerships, questions, updates, or other feedback, please email RP3@nccommunitycolleges.edu.