Member Workforce and Access Initiatives

Our members are dedicated to ensuring access to service for Vermonters throughout the state. Here are some of the initiatives they've put forth to bolster staffing and improve access to care.

• Northwestern Medical Center (NMC) has a nurse training program that is a partnership between NMC and Vermont Technical College. The program provides scholarships for enrolled students and asks that they join NMC for three years after the completion of their RN. Information can be found here.

• Brattleboro Memorial Hospital has a partnership with CCV to provide an accelerated certified medical assistant (CMA) program. The organization also has a 12-month residency program for RNs who have recently graduated from nursing school. This flyer gives information about it. This program also provides a $5000 bonus for applicants who are accepted into the program.

• Rutland Regional is doing several things to address workforce shortages. The biggest one is to increase the number of locally trained nurses. RRMC is beefing up its educational partnerships with Vermont Tech, Castleton, and the Stafford Center to increase access to health care education, including LNA training at the Stafford Center, LPN and Associates degrees in Nursing at VTC, and BSN and MSN degrees at Castleton. The hospital has five nurses who will be actually teaching at Castleton—three as faculty and two as instructors. Outside of education, RRMC is working on strategies to address the shortage of housing that discourages people from moving to Vermont, and is looking at how to address a shortage of childcare, which in some cases limits the participation of women in the workforce.

• Porter Medical Center worked with UVM Health Network compensation staff throughout the year to assess the market competitiveness for every Porter role. This assessment:
  • Considered current pay information from numerous regional and national surveys.
  • Used the 50th percentile as the point of comparison in evaluating market competitiveness.
• At UVM Health Network, leadership has put together a comprehensive Access Action Plan. Here is the original press release about it. Here is a more up-to-date summary.
• North Country Hospital has:
  • a strong nurse resident/intern program in place that recruits hometown nurses to come back here following school. This has worked well in recruiting and retaining 4-8 new nurses across all specialties each year.
  • a phone system in primary care to dial in directly to “your pod, where your provider and nurse are.”
  • continued efforts on recruitment advertising.