Looking back at her childhood, Gabriella Guajardo fondly remembers her grandmother who raised her for the first six years of her life.
She remembers her as beautiful person, as a lovely woman, Guajardo said.
But she also recalls how sick her grandmother was while she battled hepatitis B, a virus that can cause a serious liver infection.
The urge to help her grandmother — even at a young age — led Guajardo, 18, to pursue a career in health care.
After dedicating hours to reading about various programs in the health care industry, Guajardo learned about medical assistants — the person who takes patients back to their room during doctor visits, checks their vitals and assists physicians, nurses and other health career professionals with medical charts and other patient-related needs.
To Guajardo, the job seemed perfect. She connected with Front Range Community College and enrolled for the fall semester, preparing to take out loans and maintain a job on the side to cover everyday expenses. But when she met with the community college, and learned about their program, she was shocked.
Almost everything was covered.
“It is so much peace of mind,” Guajardo said. “It was just so easy and effortless. I had no worries at all.”
In the past few years, Front Range Community College has worked to expand its apprenticeship programs, specifically targeting the health care industry in effort to fill a much needed gap exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic and the droves of workers who quit their jobs in search for higher paying, more flexible careers.
In order to do exactly this, Front Range secured a portion of the U.S. Department of Labor’s $12 million Colorado Healthcare Experiential Pathways to Success grant in 2019 and has been on a mission to support students while helping supply the state with more health care workers, said Chris Heuston, Front Range Community College’s director of health care apprenticeships.
“One of the things that has really plagued higher education, and especially institutions at the community college level, is that many students start their college career, whether it’s a certificate or a degree and they don’t finish,” Heuston said.
“Life gets ahold of them and they have to quit. I’ve worked with community colleges for 27 years, and when I started to see the completion rates (with the apprenticeship program), I was like, wow, what is the secret sauce?”
The secret to retainment
As Front Range Community College looked to bolster its retention rates while helping local employers fill their staffing needs, they looked to apprenticeships.
“We didn’t have (high) enrollment, we didn’t have the pipeline and (employers) were not able to deliver the outpatient care that they wanted to,” Heuston said. “We looked at this apprenticeship model that allows people to start working at the same time they are starting school.”
In 2019, FRCC had 10 students enrolled in its pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship programs. Enrollment has also continued to climb since, with 62 students enrolled in 2020; 76 in 2021 and 160 this year.
Since 2020, 112 students have enrolled in Front Range’s medical assistant apprenticeship program and 95% have completed their FRCC certificate, while 100% of those students have passed their industry-recognized credential.
In comparison, the retention rate for students in Front Rage’s regular medical assistant program is quite a bit lower than the medical apprenticeship program. From fall 2021 to spring 2022, the retention rate for non-apprentice medical assistant students was 67%, said Jessica Peterson, spokesperson for FRCC.
Over the past few years, Heuston learned one key ingredient for the secret sauce that creates high retention rates is also the most important element of apprenticeships: paid, on-the-job training.
“(Paid on-the-job training) is really a game changer for health care,” she said. “I have worked in health care my entire career. We go to school, we do lab work, we go out on clinicals. It’s anywhere from 100 to 700 hours (of school) depending on the occupation, and it’s really limiting for a lot of our students to not have an income while they are getting the hours completed.”
Other key players in the apprenticeship program include instruction, wage increases, partnerships with health care providers and sponsors who complete paperwork and other administrative work for Front Range, Heuston said.
Since Front Range began offering the medical assistant apprenticeship program in 2019, it has been able to do all of that, Heuston said.
“My goal is that all of our apprenticeships come out with zero debt,” she said. “About 71% of our apprenticeships receive some sort of workforce, employer or federal-financial aid assistance and only 6% of apprentices have taken out loans.”
Not only does the medical assistant apprenticeship model give students the real-life hands-on learning they will need after they finish at FRCC, but this model cut the program from its original two semester format to just 20 weeks — graduating students faster and getting them into their careers quicker all at the same time, Heuston said.
Students in the program take all first semester classes in a 20-week compressed format. At the same time, they also take eight credits during a one day per week class for 10 weeks in order to complete lab work while also working four days a week in a clinic, Heuston said. They are also able to take an assessment, which allows them to receive four credits for their on-the-job learning.
“We need to be more responsive to getting students in, getting them done, getting them working,” she said. “There are 1,300 job openings in Colorado for medical assistants right now. If you took all of the community colleges in the entire state, you are probably graduating less than 100 a year. You can’t rely on traditional training and recruitment methods to fill your pipeline.”
Funding the solution
When all of this began, Boulder Community Health quickly joined forces with FRCC to bolster its workforce.
Years later, BCH has continued to grow its partnership with Front Range. Now in addition to medical assistants, BCH also helps train, surgical technicians and sterile processing technicians.
New to the field and to one of BCH’s clinics is Zoe Montano, 22, who started the medical assistant apprenticeship program in August. She is completing her apprenticeship training at BCH’s Gunbarrel Family Medicine clinic, she said.
Montano works at the clinic Monday through Wednesday and earns $17 an hour. In addition to her hourly wage, BCH also supports employees who are in school or who are going back to school with tuition. Because she is a part-time employee, Montano received $2,500 from the hospital, which covered nearly all of her expenses, she said. Thanks to the U.S. Department of Labor grant, Front Range also provides students with a stipend to help cover gas for driving to and from work, equipment needed for their job and other fees.
“I am going to school but getting paid to learn which has been a big help,” Montano said.
In April, BCH announced a $5 million donation that its foundation received to support continuing education for staff and capital improvements. That funding helped the hospital ramp up its support for students. Last year, employees with less than five years of employment at were eligible for $1,000 in tuition reimbursement and employees who have worked at BCH for five or more years could receive $1,500 in tuition reimbursement. Now, in addition to the $2,500 for part-time employees, BCH also offers $4,000 for half-time employees and $5,250 for full-time employees, said Larry Novissimo, vice president of BCH’s ambulatory operations.
In order to train the apprentices in the clinic, BCH must also retain experienced medical assistants, Novissimo said. To do that, BCH applied for and received a $40,000 grant from the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, which helps the hospital pay its preceptors for the time they spend training apprentices. The department has also developed a medical assistant preceptor education track where medical assistants, who are interested in training, can take a brief training course with BCH’s clinical educator to learn about being a preceptor.
Novissimo said BCH plans to maintain this level of financial assistance for students and hopes to increase it by eventually paying apprentices during the eight hours per week they are in class at FRCC.
“If we can help fund education (for someone) to attend school, which then allows us to recruit and retain that individual to stay with us, it’s a wonderful pattern,” Novissimo said. “There is a job ready for them when they’re done. It does seem as a nation we need to have a larger, more collective strategy to identify folks who want to be working in health care and help them fund that.”
Working toward a common goal
The grant from U.S. Department of Labor, which greatly supports Front Range’s medical assistant apprenticeship program, is set to end next summer.
Before that happens though, there are a few options the Colorado Department of Education can pursue to continue to support higher education in the state. One option is it can apply for an extension, which it hopes to do, said Renee Welch, director of collegiate apprenticeships for the Colorado Department of Education. But if the extension is not granted, Welch said higher education institutions can tap into burgeoning state aid.
One specific example of state aid that Front Range Community College is preparing to allocate to students comes from recently passed Senate Bill 22-226, which will allocate $26 million to help community colleges create or continue in-demand short-term — 30 course credits hours or less — health care programs.
“I know our colleagues in the (Colorado Department of Labor and Employment) also have grants to expand apprenticeships across Colorado,” Welch said. “There’s a large amount of federal funding in the state to further apprenticeships.”
Welch said continued support like the federal aid or state aid is crucial to boosting the workforce in Colorado.
“Everywhere you turn, you think about different industries and high turnover,” she said. “I think about the retirement of baby boomers and higher education is changing. I think one of the ways higher education can demonstrate its relevance is by collaborating with employers to author and create that instruction that employers need from their employees.”
But without a sponsor — one of the key elements for FRCC’s apprenticeship programs — access or continued access to the federal funds that helped it jumpstart its program may not have been possible.
Luckily, the Boulder Chamber of Commerce was ahead of the game and started a health care sector partnership about four years ago to address this exact need, said Corine Waldau, the chamber’s senior director of economic vitality.
The chamber in 2019 registered its medical apprenticeship program with the U.S. Department of Labor. This allows schools like Front Range to work with the chamber, who sponsors their programs to ensure they are registered, meaning they meet the criteria put in place by the federal government, thus giving them access to funds from the Colorado Healthcare Experiential Pathways to Success program, Waldau said.
“We literally are the middlemen between the Department of Labor and the (FRCC) program,” Waldau said. “I believe that by having an intermediary model, you decrease the administrative burden on our small businesses and our businesses.”
The chamber is now preparing to expand its apprenticeship sponsorship offerings to include about five IT programs and two bioscience manufacturing programs, Waldau said.
“Apprenticeships are the belle of the ball right now,” she said. “They are a very popular solution nationwide, and we want our businesses to be able to access the funds that are available, and really, training programs that provide meaningful careers for people in our community.”
This content was originally published here.
