Psychological Self-Sufficiency: An Empowerment-Based Theory for Workforce Training and Adult Education

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

12-12-2019

Publication Title

Pathways to Careers in Health Care

Pages

303-349

Publisher Name

W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research

Publisher Location

Kalamazoo, MI

Abstract

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed by Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010 effected major changes in the financing and delivery of health care in the United States. It also authorized creation of the Health Profession Opportunity Grants program (HPOG), a demonstration effort within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to provide opportunities for education and training that lead to jobs and career advancement in health care for recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and other low-income individuals and to respond to the increasing demand for health care professionals. As a demonstration program, HPOG also featured a mandated federal evaluation to assess its success and a corresponding research program—the HPOG University Partnership Research Grants (HPOG UP), a collaborative effort between the program operators and academic researchers from different disciplines—to observe various aspects of its operations.

HPOG unites two important innovations in workforce development programming for serving low-income populations in recent decades, career pathways and sector strategies, by actively fostering the use of the former in the context of one major sector—health care. Health care is one of the only sectors that continued to exhibit growth year after year in periods of general economic expansion as well as decline. Health care employment even continued to expand in most states and communities across the United States through the Great Recession in 2008–2009. In addition to offering insights into these strategies and their evolution, the authors in this book present the findings, lessons, and recommendations that emanated from HPOG research and evaluations for consideration by policymakers, program operators, and other researchers.

Comments

Author Posting © W.E. Upjohn Institute, 2019. This article is posted here by permission of W.E. Upjohn Institute for personal use, not for redistribution. The article was published in Pathways to Careers in Health Care: Evaluation of Recent Partnerships, December 2019, https://doi.org/10.17848/9780880996679

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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