Building and Sustaining the Health Care Workforce for Marginalized Communities
A special issue of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-4601). This special issue belongs to the section "Health Care Sciences".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2025 | Viewed by 31
Special Issue Editor
Interests: health policy; healthcare safety net; social structural inequities and impacts on aging; Medicaid; long-term care; access to healthcare for minority populations; diversity, equity, and inclusion in medical education; healthcare workforce
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Decades of research and practice have shown that the most effective healthcare providers are those who hail from the communities they serve. While the advent of the pandemic brought greater attention to workforce gaps, worker burnout surged, hostility and distrust towards healthcare workers grew, and there remains little evidence that supply has improved in marginalized communities. Furthermore, because marginalized communities are also those most impacted by public health and climate crises, each successive challenge potentially raises the barriers to recruiting and supporting future healthcare workers. This Special Issue invites original scholarship on the underexplored persistent challenges to health workforce diversity, equity, and inclusion; the long-term impacts of COVID-19 and climate events on workforce supply; the impact of new challenges that have arisen since 2020; the integration of community and lay professions into existing public health and healthcare systems; the transformation of systems and teams into new operations; and/or the policies that have supported the above-mentioned integration. This Special Issue also invites case studies and practice-oriented papers that describe the efforts or strategies to achieve the following: scale up established programs and/or secure sustainability; make the necessary changes to institutional and organizational structures that have historically resisted reforms; or drive the implementation of sustainable policy changes.
Dr. Michelle J. Ko
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- health workforce
- healthcare professionals
- healthcare workers
- underserved communities
- health professions shortage areas
- diversity, equity and inclusion
- community health workers
- lay professionals
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