Twenty-two hospitals, clinics, universities and junior colleges across the state are about to get a total of $9.4 million to help educate more nurses, doctors, technicians and other badly needed health- care workers.
The three-year Health Professions Initiative, unveiled Tuesday by The Colorado Trust, is designed to train health-care workers across the state, especially in rural areas.
The entire country has been in the throes of a nurse shortage for years; in Colorado, that shortage is estimated at twice the national average.
And experts predict the situation will only get worse as the population ages.
Most of the state’s rural counties have been designated by the federal government as lacking enough health-care workers – including doctors, dentists, nurses and mental health professionals – to care for their residents.
That is one of the key areas the trust’s initiative hopes to address.
Of the 22 grantees, 13 specifically serve parts of the state outside the Front Range.
That is because being a doctor or an X-ray technician in a small, Eastern Plains town is a vastly different experience from that of working in a city or suburb, said Denise Denton, executive director of the Colorado Rural Health Center.
“We need to find and nurture people who see rural practice as a benefit,” she said.
The Colorado Trust, an independent, nonprofit grant- making foundation, also has set aside money to evaluate the success of the various programs and to create a statewide, publicly accessible database containing information about health professions.
Staff writer Karen Auge; can be reached at 303-8201-733 or kauge@denverpost.com.
