Not yet a year old, the Alliance for Healthcare Education is expected to take a significant step forward in the coming year with $15 million in state funding.
The amount was part of the final budget signed Friday by Gov. Mike Parson.
The alliance is a partnership between CoxHealth, Missouri State University, Ozarks Technical Community College and Springfield Public Schools to revolutionize the way health care professionals are training in southwest Missouri. The goal is to fill critical workforce shortages.
“To meet that need, we simply had to think differently,” said Shallina Goodnight, executive director of the alliance, in a release. “We needed to find ways to join forces and create paths to not only educate the next generation, but also to positively transform the health and prosperity of our region for generations to come.”
Each partner has allocated resources to the unprecedented effort but the state funding is the first major investment, which was needed to propel the work forward.
“It’s hard to even quantify. Without the funding, we would just be looking at what we could do — which would be very small, incremental changes — over a long period of time,” Goodnight said in a Monday interview.