By Mara O'Malley / Broadcast version by Farah Siddiqi reporting for the Kent State-Ohio News Connection Collaboration.

The Ohio Nurses Association has undertaken a so-called Code Red campaign to call attention to the shortage of nurses in Ohio hospitals, which could lead to a patient care crisis.

The campaign focuses on five areas, including staffing levels, working conditions, the nursing workforce pipeline, corporate trends and trust and agency within the profession. They hope to encourage employers and lawmakers to implement the staffing ratios their nurses need.

"That is our sounding the alarm and putting forward real workable strategies to address the nurse staffing crisis in Ohio," said Rick Lucas, president and executive director of the Ohio Nurses Association and himself a registered nurse.

The ONA conducted a survey in 2023 that received over 11,000 responses from licensed nurses in Ohio, seeking to find out why nurses are leaving bedside care positions.

They found:

• 58% of nurses who left bedside roles did so because of their patient care load.


• 70% of direct care nurses are currently considering leaving bedside roles because of their patient care load.


• 88% of nurses would consider staying in bedside roles if Ohio had legally enforceable minimum staffing standards.

"Nurses need help. We needed help before the pandemic," Lucas said. "After enduring that and dealing with the exacerbated staffing shortage, we really need help. And we need for people to know what's happening in our hospitals so that they can help fight for the change that they need as well."


Ohio House Bill 285, the Nurse Workforce and Safe Patient Care Act, was introduced in September 2023. If enacted, the bill would establish minimum staffing standards in Ohio hospitals, create a loan-to-grant program to support nurses in training, ensure accountability in hospital compliance, establish nurse staffing committees with direct caregivers, and create whistleblower protections for patients, nurses and hospital staff.


The Ohio Nurses Association supports H.B. 285.


"It's a way for us to attract and retain those nurses here," said Rep. Elgin Rogers (D-Toledo), a co-sponsor of the bill. "We want to make sure that we have nurses who are qualified. Nurses are in high demand, but we want to make sure that they are trained properly and they remain in Ohio."


The nursing shortage around Ohio hospitals started before the COVID-19 and is expected to get worse, peaking in early 2027, Lucas said. Nurses now have more responsibilities than ever, ranging from caring for patients to taking out the trash and changing the linens.


"There were barely enough nurses scheduled already, and then when COVID hit, things only got worse, with stressing an already broken system," Lucas said.


Beyond that, Lucas said hospitals are relying heavily on travel nurses - nurses who aren't based in any one location, but instead work for several months at hospitals in need of staff before moving on.


The $20 million loan-to-grant in H.B. 285 is designed to help encourage nurses to stay in Ohio. Nurses could be eligible for up to $12,000 in forgivable loans if they stay in Ohio for at least five years of work.


"In this particular item, there is significantly a higher value than some of those other programs," said Dr. Wendy Batch-Wilson, Dean of Nursing Cuyahoga Community College. "With the $5,000 that's available, but then also the ability for that to turn into a grant for the full amount."


Rogers, a Democrat, and his Republican co-sponsor hope the bill will go to the floor for a vote before the General Assembly session ends.


"They went to college, they went to school, they sacrificed," said Rogers. "So we want to make sure we're creating an atmosphere where they can do what they were called to do in this great state."




This collaboration is produced in association with Media in the Public Interest and funded in part by the George Gund Foundation.


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This week, workers who provide in-home and nursing home care rallied against cuts to Medicaid.

Washington's Medicaid, known as Apple Health, covers nearly 2 million low-income people in the state, including the majority of nursing home residents. Service Employees International Union Local 775 is the union representing long-term care workers who assist seniors and people with disabilities, in their homes and in nursing facilities.

Adam Glickman, secretary-treasurer of SEIU 775, said caregivers help with such essential tasks as cooking, bathing, medication management and transportation. He emphasized cutting Medicaid would mean many would not get the care they need.

"That could mean they're left alone in their homes, without care," Glickman pointed out. "For many people, it'll mean ending up in emergency rooms."

President Donald Trump and House Republicans are proposing $880 billion in cuts from the Energy and Commerce Committee, most of which would come from Medicaid. Critics said the goal of the plan is to help pay for tax cuts that would largely benefit the wealthiest Americans.

Kandie Luo, a caregiver and union member who depends on Medicaid for her own family's health care, as well as for her income, emigrated from China 40 years ago and thinks cuts to Medicaid would especially harm immigrant communities.

"This is not just about the number, it's about the real people," Luo stressed. "About the family, like me, depending on the Medicaid to survive."

The Trump administration said Medicaid cuts would focus on reducing waste and fraud in the program. Glickman contended it is an issue that has been blown out of proportion.

"I think this has become a red herring or kind of smoke screen by people who just really don't want to admit that what they're doing is cutting people's health care," Glickman argued.

A new poll from the health research organization KFF confirmed Medicaid's popularity across the country, with only 17% of Americans supporting cuts to the program.

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By Ramona Schindelheim for WorkingNation.
Broadcast version by Isobel Charle for Oregon News Service reporting for the WorkingNation-Public News Service Collaboration

From a translator helping a neighbor navigate health services or locate a food bank, a doula assisting a mother during childbirth, or a former inmate working with people exiting prison to reach healthier outcomes, community health workers have a wide range of roles.

They are frontline public health workers who usually live in the communities they serve and include volunteers. Research shows they have positive impacts by helping people access preventive care resulting in things like an increase in cancer screenings and reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Community health workers (CHWs), also called promotores in Spanish-speaking communities, have existed for generations and have largely been under the radar. But their importance was thrust into the spotlight when COVID hit, sparking growing efforts to bring more structure to their workforce and ensure their jobs are sustainable.

Community Health Workers: Trusted Voices

"Because of the pandemic, there was the awareness that a lot of people didn't have trusted information. There are a lot of barriers for communities and accessing health care resources and getting trusted information, specifically looking at Black, Brown, Indigenous communities, immigrant, refugee communities," explains Jennine Smart, executive director, Oregon Community Health Workers Association.

"Being able to have a workforce that's already connected in community-based space to provide reliable, trusted, and honest information has been pivotal.

"It really amplified the recognition of this workforce and the value that CHWs bring more broadly to communities and really serving as a liaison and a bridge between health settings, health systems, and communities," adds Smart.

Those settings can include hospitals, clinics and community organizations. And CHWs are in demand.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 63,400 CHWs in the United States, although that may be an undercount since there are different job titles for CHWs, especially in community health organizations.

It's estimated that jobs for CHWs will grow 13% between 2023 and 2033.

The median salary is $48,200, according to the BLS , with a high school diploma or equivalent required.

Empowering Through Technology

Among the latest efforts to create sustainable jobs for CHWs is the work of Pear Suite, a digital health company launched in 2021.

I spoke with the co-founder and CEO Colby Takeda at CES 2025 in January.

"Our company is all about empowering them, supporting them with technology, with software system that allows them to document all their activities, track the needs of individuals, track how they're getting support, whether it's through organizations or health care system or social services," says Takeda, who has personal experience with caregiver support as well as the nonprofit sector.

The company counts more than 175 partners in community-based organizations and health care companies and says it's had an impact on more than 100,000 lives.

Takeda explains the Pear Suite is providing accessible training in different languages to convert a community health worker's lived experience and help them with credentials and certifications since there is no standardization process across the country.

States have their own certification process and reimbursement process. Grants had funded much of this work, but 29 states now allow services by CHW to be reimbursed by Medicaid, according to a 2022 KFF survey.

Pear Suite, says Takeda, is helping CHWs utilize their technology to track their work. "It's really infrastructure for them to get more revenue, whether it's through reimbursement, through the new Medicaid or Medicare policies that allow for community health workers to now get paid or for them to secure more funding through grants with better data," stresses Takeda.

And it comes with hurdles.

"These organizations and these workers have been on paper and spreadsheets for many years. For them to transition to now a system for them to document and do claims and maintain compliance with health plans has been really challenging," he adds.

Takeda explains that the company provides wraparound support teams to better understand contracts with health plans and things like compliance and how to do claims.

The result, he says, is that community based organizations that can range from a small community center to a barbershop now have a formal structure.

"These are people that are providing screenings or resources to early young mothers to individuals who are facing homelessness or health sickness. These are organizations that have been doing this work for decades but never got paid by the health care system. We're now helping them get paid sometimes the average of $15,000 a month additional, which is huge for them," says Takeda.

Using Skills From Lived Experiences for a Living

One community health worker who credits Takeda's technology with helping his work become more sustainable is Joe Calderon, a former inmate who served 17 years in prison who has made it his mission to build better outcomes for people in his California community while supporting his family.

"Now I can change my life, my family's life, and my community's life, by slowly making a little bit more money by creating my own organization" says Calderon, a manager of recruiting and training for Urban Alchemy, based in San Francisco with a mission to "heal neighborhoods by employing the unique talents of returning citizens to transform communities and spaces."

Calderon has a Community Health Worker certificate from San Francisco City College and started out as a community health worker after exiting prison.

"I found my voice for advocacy as I watched so many men die in prison of treatable diseases," he explains. And he says it made him think more about health care when he had to take medicine for high blood pressure at the age of 29years old while behind bars. It's his lived experience that has spurred him to change outcomes of the communities he knows.

"No one ever taught me to go to the doctor. I already knew, when I started to see about health care, that the communities that I came from, in my perspective, took better care of our cars. Our cars had tinted windows, rims and beat. But nobody was talking about going to the dentist. Nobody was talking about going to the doctor regularly," adds Calderon.

Building a Sustainable Workforce

On a wider scale, Oregon, where a statewide professional workforce association for community health workers was established in 2011 and has an 80 training requirement for CHWs is aiming to take its new partnership with Pear Suite to a new level.

"We really want to support the sustainability of the workforce, right, and that we don't want to just get everybody trained as a CHW. We want to make sure that folks are able to be employed, and that we have a sustainable workforce," explains the Oregon Community Health Workers Association's Jennine Smart.

To do that, Smart explains, the organization is looking to use the platform to build a network that will take over the administrative burden of billing management while at the same time creating a system to get a more comprehensive view of the work done by community health workers.

"So we're looking at building a community based organization network. And so it'd be community based organizations that are employing community health workers and providing community health worker services. And then we'd hold a contract with Medicaid" explains Smart.

In short, it would provide structure not just for billing but case management. She describes the goal as building a more comprehensive payment system that hasn't always included all the work they do in an effort to recognize the key roles CHWs play.

She adds, "Those are the folks who are out there. They're getting their feet wet. They're in the dirt, they're really doing that connected hard work that is so meaningful."


Ramona Schindelheim wrote this article for WorkingNation.

Support for this reporting was provided by Lumina Foundation.


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The Missouri Foundation for Health is partnering with The Marshall Project on the launch of a St. Louis nonprofit newsroom highlighting the legal system's effect on health, especially in marginalized communities.

The Marshall Project focuses on investigative, data-driven journalism to explain the justice system, especially to those affected by it. With the foundation's support, its St. Louis newsroom will cover topics like the death penalty, juvenile justice, health care in prison conditions and reentry challenges.

Molly Crisp, senior communications strategist at the foundation, shared the goals of the new partnership.

"We recognize that the criminal justice system disproportionately harms certain populations and that exacerbates health inequities," Crisp explained. "We're hoping through this partnership that we're bringing to light some of the issues that are rampant in the legal system and that we can address those issues."

Statistics show low-income marginalized communities face higher pollution, increasing asthma risk, along with other health problems, and incarcerated individuals often endure long waits for medical care and face barriers to mental health treatment due to staff shortages and limited resources.

Katie Moore, a reporter for the Marshall Project, said its goal is to investigate such issues both locally and statewide.

"We have been talking with different groups, individuals who are connected to the criminal justice system in some way," Moore noted. "To see what their concerns are, what they see as being missing in the media landscape in St. Louis in terms of coverage of some of these more in-depth investigative issues."

With an increasing number of older people who are incarcerated, Missouri prisons face growing health care demands, including the need for geriatric care and hospice services.

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