NCLR's Health Care Career Pathways Initiative

Continuing my blog post from yesterday, I will talk about the National Council of La Raza's (NCLR) Career Pathways Initiatives. 

NCLR is currently operating its Career Pathways Initiative in the two of the most Latino-dominated industries:  health care and customer service and retail. Today, I will talk about the health care initiative and tomorrow, about the customer service and retail initiative.

As some of you may know, 13.6% of people in health care support occupations employees are Latinos. Most of these jobs are in lower-end health care occupations such as home health aides and nursing aides. However, Latino representation in more advanced positions such as registered nurses (4.7%) or diagnostic technologists and technicians (5%) is extremely low.

Traditionally, Latinos have not excelled in postsecondary education because of a lack of supportive services available to them, including extra tutoring, English language skills development, child care support, housing, transportation, and mental health services. NCLR incorporates bridge programs, contextualized curriculum, and vocational English-as-a-second-language (ESL) programs to help participants graduate from each level in the program and advance to the next.

NCLR's Health Care Career Pathways Initiative focuses on advancing Latinos with limited or no English skills to advanced health care careers.  The current program looks at moving participants through different levels of training, from ESL and vocational ESL courses to becoming a certified nursing assistant, (CNA) a licensed practical nurse (LPN), and a registered nurse (RN). Beyond this, participants are pushed to achieve a baccalaureate in nursing and attend graduate school. This is done through intensive case management and supportive services. Moreover, the program provides entry and exit opportunities at all levels of the program.

The pre-LPN A and pre-LPN B bridge programs provide extra tutoring and support to those participants who are not ready or able to make the jump to the next level.  The chart below describes how individuals move through the program:

The initiative has successfully trained over 200 Latinos at the LPN and medical assistant levels in the last three years. The average wage gain for program participants is 150%. Besides providing career mobility opportunities for low-skill, low-income Latinos, the initiative is also increasing the number of bilingual and bicultural Latinos in the health care industry so that linguistically appropriate health care becomes more available to Latinos, a population that is expected to compose one-third of the nation’s population by 2050. The NCLR Health Care Career Pathways Initiative was also awarded the U.S. Department of Labor's 2008 Recognition of Excellence Award.

Now that you know about the health care initiative, in tomorrow's post, I'll provide information about NCLR’s Customer Service and Retail Initiative.

Guest blogger Surabhi Jain is a workforce development specialist at NCLR.

Comments

[Dissertation Editing]

Blogs are so informative where we get lots of information on any topic. Nice job keep it up!!

[Rob @ registered nurses]

The NLCr’s initiative will be great news for Latinos who are aspiring for an advancement n the medical field. I know of many Latinos who are intelligent and passionate about becoming doctors and registered nurses but are hinder because of language barrier and slim opportunities of getting the job because they are Latinos. Nevertheless, many communities and society leaders are now acknowledging the impact that Latinos are offering to the health care industry that some are backing Latinos to gain seats in the hospital boards. I am thinking that we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg as medical advancement and open mindedness on the society will drastically change the medical field.