The Colorado Health Institute (CHI) is examining five health care workforce issues and how they affect rural and non-rural areas differently. Those issues are aging of the health care workforce, diversity of the workforce, career ladders in health care professions, educational pipelines and scopes of practice of various types of providers.

The study, funded by The Colorado Trust, will look at data from CHI’s health professions workforce surveys, state data from other sources and published literature on each issue. Recognizing that there is a health care workforce shortage in the state, CHI will analyze how the shortage is affecting rural and non-rural areas differently, determine what data are missing and examine steps that can be taken to address the differences.