Supportive partnerships are essential to the “grow your own” approach to workforce development through Health Professions Education and Training (HP-ET) programs. In this episode of the STAR² Center Talks Workforce Success podcast, Amy Weinstein of Thundermist Health Center explains how cultivating a variety of partnerships at the local, state, and national level supports Thundermist’s array of HP-ET programming to prepare prospective members of the workforce and support their current employees in their personal and professional goals. Amy also shares how these partnerships have helped to prepare Thundermist to bring additional programming in-house in the coming years as an official teaching health center.

Transcript by Rev.com

Helen Rhea Vernier: Welcome to the STAR² Center Talks Workforce Success podcast series. I’m your host for this episode, Helen Rhea Vernier, Associate Director of Workforce Development at the STAR² Center at the Association of Clinicians for the Underserved, or ACU. This season we’re focusing on health professions pathways as a tool for recruitment and retention. Today I’m talking to Amy Weinstein, Director of Workforce Development at Thundermist Health Center, serving Woonsocket, West Warwick, and South Counties in Rhode Island. Thank you so much for being here.

Amy Weinstein: Thank you so much, Helen. It’s such a pleasure to be here today.

Helen Rhea Vernier: Wonderful. To get us started, could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your organization?

Amy Weinstein: Absolutely. So Thundermist Health Center is a federally qualified health center. We’re a full service primary care provider with medical, dental, and behavioral health services located in Rhode Island. We care for patients regardless of insurance and ability to pay, and our mission is to improve the health of patients and communities by delivering exceptional healthcare, removing barriers to that care and advancing healthy lifestyles. And in 2023, Thundermist cared for over 62,000 patients, which is a 20% increase over five years. With that increase in patients comes an increased need to recruit and retain our employees. And so, I’ve been at Thundermist for about 18 months. I was hired with federal funding that recognized the need for innovative programs to support our employees and the next generation of healthcare professionals. And through this funding, Thundermist has been able to educate next generation nurses, address behavioral health provider shortages, and train medical and dental assistants to name a few. And I look forward to talking more about some of those programs today.

Helen Rhea Vernier: Awesome. Thank you so much. It’s so cool to get a little taste of what we’ll be talking about and hear all the cool things that Thundermist is doing. Can you tell us about Thundermist Health Center’s Health Professions Education and Training program?

Amy Weinstein: Absolutely. Thundermist has been engaged in workforce development and health professions education and training programs for almost 10 years, and really starting with our nationally accredited primary care nurse practitioner fellowship and our psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner fellowship. And through these fellowships, we’ve prepared 39 new nurse practitioners since 2015. And the fellowship is a 12-month rotational program, including weekly didactic sessions and specialty clinical rotations. And with a year of employment following the fellowship, these programs are vital recruitment and retention tool for Thundermist.

And kind of building upon the success of our nurse practitioner fellowships, Thundermist is preparing to launch our own physician residency program in 2026, making Thundermist an official teaching health center. The residency will train four providers per year as part of a three-year program. Really, data shows that residents who train in a health center are more likely to practice in underserved settings during their career. The residency will also allow Thundermist to care for more patients. So in fact, we expect to care for an estimated 1600 additional unique patients as residents learn side by side with our experienced physicians.

And then finally, as I mentioned earlier, with federal funding, we were able to pilot our own cohort of dental assistant and medical assistant training programs in partnership with our local community college. And these programs were a success considering we hired over half of the students who completed, and we also learned a lot through those pilots. Now we are in the planning process of developing a registered apprenticeship program for medical assistants, which we hope to pilot in 2025.

Helen Rhea Vernier: Amazing. You all are doing such cool work. I’m just blown away and so impressed. So what are some of the greatest challenges that Thundermist has faced in developing these HP-ET programs? And then on the flip side, what are some of the greatest successes you’ve had?

Amy Weinstein: So I always like to start with the successes, so I’ll start there. I would say one of our greatest successes has been just really enhancing our partnerships with our public higher education institutions. And one example is that we’ve been able to work with faculty to customize undergraduate nursing curriculum and to include content on primary care nursing into the curriculum, which is the first time this content has been included. So it’s super exciting.

Thundermist also brings a panel of our nurses to speak to approximately a hundred students every semester, and we host a group of students during their clinic rotations as well. And we’re in our second year of this project and already we’ve seen undergraduates who may typically have gone into acute care nursing, expressed an interest in primary care nursing, and we’ve been able to employ some of those students part-time as medical assistants while they complete their academic studies.

So a second success that kind of warms my heart is some of the personal success stories that we hear from our employees. So Thundermist was able to grant scholarships to five qualified employees to help them complete their bachelor’s degree in social services while they worked full-time. And this has been a self-reported life-changing experience for many of them who are realizing both their professional and personal goals.

Shifting to challenges. There always are challenges, of course. So one of our biggest challenges is finding funding to sustain these programs. And I think that’s a common challenge that we probably hear among health centers. We’re really fortunate to have an excellent development team who finds a lot of local, regional, and federal grant opportunities. And certainly in some cases our long-standing programs have returned an investment that has made our organization support and sustain those programs through our organization’s funding.

And apart from funding challenges, some of the programmatic challenges we’ve seen are sort of the continued sustainability of participants in the program. So particularly around completion rates in our medical assistant training program pilot, so put together that pilot so that participants could work full time and take classes. And in order to do that, they had to take classes on Fridays and Saturdays. And this pilot took place during the summer and it was difficult for some participants to stay motivated and to give up their free time on Saturdays during the summer.

So in planning for the future, we’ve decided to, as I mentioned, develop a registered apprenticeship “earn while you learn” model that will integrate the training alongside their employment, which we hope will see a more consistent engagement.

Helen Rhea Vernier: Nice. Yeah, it sounds like you’ve had some truly amazing successes and that you’re also being thoughtful about the challenges you’ve already faced and what might come and addressing those head on. So thank you so much for sharing that wisdom. So I think you mentioned this a tiny bit, but how have you seen HP-ET programs affect staff recruitment and/or retention at Thundermist?

Amy Weinstein: So that’s a great question. Many of our programs are so new that we don’t yet have the data to support recruitment and retention efforts. However, one program I did not yet mention is our social work internship program, which has been operating for approximately five years, where third party funding does support a dedicated bilingual preceptor to supervise eight social work students for undergraduates and for graduate students. And the funding also pays student wages during their time in the internship. This program does support primarily bilingual Spanish English students and has seen at least one to two graduate students per cohort stay at Thundermist for employment as behavioral health clinicians. And we’ve also seen a few of the undergraduate interns continue their graduate studies and return as graduate interns. So it’s a real successful program.

Helen Rhea Vernier: Awesome. Yeah, that sounds super cool, and I love the focus on those bilingual providers and preceptors. That’s really cool. So what recommendations, tools, or resources do you have for a health center who’s just getting started to plan or build their own HP-ET programs?

Amy Weinstein: Yeah, a few things that we’ve done that I would recommend. So this spring Thundermist has participated in several HRSA NTTAP learning collaboratives, the National Training and Technical Assistant Partners. And in one partnership in particular, we’ve developed a health profession student training playbook, which really has been instrumental in streamlining our processes for clinical student externships, and really helped our leadership, senior leadership team to recognize clinical student externships internships as a potential for recruitment.

We’ve also developed strong relationships, as I mentioned before, with our public academic institutions, also community-based organizations and with our PCA, Primary Care Association. So Thundermist also participates in statewide workforce development committees. And we’ve already seen actually some important workforce development bills get passed during this legislative session. So super excited about that. And through those bills, we anticipate some future funding might help us enhance training for our providers as preceptors and provide funding to develop or enhance our career ladders, like our apprenticeship program.

So having those strong local partnerships to me is essential to building sustainable programs and receiving some of that funding. And last, we’re really fortunate to be in such a small state where you’re always sort of two degrees of separation away from each other, but cross-state networks are also so important. And this spring I was fortunate enough to attend the 2024 ACU Association of Clinicians for the Underserved STAR² Center Workforce Symposium, where I took away many best practices from other PCAs and health centers, as well as meeting colleagues that I can call upon with questions, certainly as Thundermist runs into challenges developing our own programs. So just a shout-out and a thank you to the STAR² Center for their amazing information and facilitation at the conference. If you have a future opportunity to attend, it’s a great conference and really worthwhile.

Helen Rhea Vernier: Amazing. Thank you so much for that shout-out. We love to hear that it was useful and we loved having you at the event. A quick follow up, was that learning collaborative with CHC Inc. is that right?

Amy Weinstein: It was, yes.

Helen Rhea Vernier: Okay, nice. So yeah, listeners of the podcast will know that we interviewed them for the last episode. So very exciting to have that full circle moment of another resource. But all that sounds amazing, and I’m so glad to hear about all your partnerships and all the wisdom you have gained and continue to gain and share as you develop these programs. So thank you so much for all that.

Amy, thank you so much for joining us today. And listeners, thank you for tuning in. We hope today’s conversation provided you with ideas, suggestions, and insights into ways you can approach health professions pathways programming for recruitment and retention. Be sure to check out all of our free workforce tools and resources found at chcworkforce.org and check out all that Thundermist is doing at www.thundermisthealth.org. Thank you again so much and have a wonderful rest of your day.