Hopkins Health System Awarded $3 Million By Department Of Labor For Worker Training Program

Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao today awarded The Johns Hopkins Health System a $3 million demonstration grant to expand and enhance its existing employee training programs. The Department of Labor (DOL) grant is part of a national health care initiative aimed at improving career opportunities for health care workers. Secretary Chao awarded the grant during a press briefing held at The Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Hopkins and the state of Maryland are the first recipients of the initiative's grants. According to the Department of Labor, "the Health Care Initiative is the solution phase of the President's High Growth Job Training Initiative, a strategic effort to make the public workforce system demand-driven."

Hopkins will use its grant to help current employees enhance their career opportunities through job assessment, counseling and training programs. "This is all part of the longstanding commitment by the Johns Hopkins Health System to "grow its own employees," says Ronald R. Peterson, president of The Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Johns Hopkins Health System. "We believe that one of the most cost-effective ways to rapidly meet the workforce and skills shortages in our industry is to do all we can to keep the people we have and to provide them with the skills we need."

With the grant, Hopkins will further expand and enhance its existing programs aimed at assessing the aptitudes and interests of targeted categories of health care workers within the Johns Hopkins Health System and provide those workers with the training, development and support they need to move to higher-skilled, higher-wage jobs within the institution.

Under terms of the grant, Hopkins is tasked with developing a jobs training program that can be replicated by other health care organizations. Accordingly, Hopkins will provide information, training modules, teacher guides, research data, competency definitions and other materials to the health care industry and the public workforce system as directed by the U.S. Department of Labor.

"Just as Hopkins served as the model for the modern academic medical center, we hope to serve as a national model for developing programs that give health care workers, no matter where they work, every opportunity to grow and succeed and to have truly rewarding, long-term careers in an industry that is so important to so many," says Pamela D. Paulk, vice president for human resources for The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System.