How Kansas and Missouri can fill the health care worker shortage | Opinion
In Missouri, Kansas and across the heartland, one of the barriers to economic growth isn’t a lack of jobs. It’s a shortage of workers in critical sectors such as health care — but herein lies the opportunity. Hospitals are stretched. Clinics are understaffed. Rural communities, in particular, are struggling to recruit and retain nurses and front-line providers particularly as demand for care rises. From maternal health to mental health, there are thousands of high-paying job opportunities right in our local communities.
When patients cannot access care, it’s not just their physical well-being that is at stake. It’s the economic well-being of those individuals, their families and their broader community. When hospitals cannot staff beds, communities become less attractive as places to work and live. And when young people do not see clear pathways into high-demand careers like nursing, we miss an opportunity to grow our workforce from within and retain that talent.
The good news is that the heartland is taking clear action to address these challenges by breaking down silos, identifying opportunities for collaboration and creating measurable improvements in health care delivery and workforce needs.
That is the idea behind the Heartland Health Caucus, an initiative launched by Heartland Forward. It brings together policymakers from eight heartland states — including Missouri and Kansas — to advance smarter, more effective health strategies across the region. Both states’ delegations include state health leaders from the executive branch, and Missouri’s delegation also features two legislative leaders. Together, they form a consortium of professionals working across the branches of government and together with different states to strengthen both Kansas and Missouri’s approach to health care. At its core, this is what the program is about: creating a space to share what is working, aligning on priorities and moving faster together than any one state could alone.
Instead of states tackling these challenges independently, duplicating efforts or missing opportunities to adapt proven solutions for their communities, the Heartland Health Caucus flips that model. States are learning from one another in real time — whether it is strengthening the role of community health workers, expanding access to care or identifying new ways to support and grow the health care workforce. When one state makes progress, others can build on it rather than starting from scratch. For Missouri and Kansas, the initiative provides an additional opportunity to address the states’ own workforce challenges while also helping shape a regional strategy that strengthens the entire heartland.
Policy coordination married with tactical, on-the-ground programs to help build a stronger, more accessible pipeline into health care careers for the current workforce are what we need to meet health care workforce needs — and that is on display in Missouri.
Heartland Forward’s Nursing Pathways initiative in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, works to expand and modernize entry into the nursing field by making it easier, faster and more affordable for local workers to enter and advance in one of the most in-demand professions in the country.
The program’s mission is to provide the skills, training and hands-on experience needed to start a nursing career in southeast Missouri through fully funded training, certifications and paid apprenticeships. This approach is grounded in what works — aligning education with workforce demand and giving students real, attainable routes into high-quality jobs with growing demand.
The U.S. will need hundreds of thousands of nurses in the coming years to meet growing demand, and that’s why workforce programs such as Nursing Pathways are so critical. In heartland states, where rural hospitals play an outsize role in community health and economic stability, the need for more well-trained nurses will be especially acute, and initiatives like Nursing Pathways will help fill that gap.
Heartland states are showing what it looks like to take a coordinated, practical approach to health care challenges. For too long, the conversation on the health care workforce has centered on shortages, but the real story here is opportunity. Thousands of high-quality jobs exist in the communities that need them most, and the heartland is connecting people to those roles with intention and results. Now we must grow — aligning states, employers and educators around the shared goal of building the workforce our communities need this decade. The heartland has shown the way. Now the nation must act.
Angie is president of Heartland Forward, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that turns ideas into action for states and local communities in the U.S. heartland.