How the loss of the KHPOP Grant is impacting our LTC Communities and Students
Last year the government ended the KHPOP grant which had been around for about 12 years and was the biggest payor of entry level healthcare training for schools such as ours.
This could not have happened at a worse time with healthcare severely struggling to rebuild after the pandemic and soring inflation resulting in less funds for potential students to spend on education.
The result has changed the landscape of healthcare training. Our school has suffered an enormous blow from the loss of the grant. Literally thousands of students that came though our doors took advantage of this grant to take our fast entry level inexpensive courses to get started in a healthcare career. The end of this grant left a huge void which has shifted the entire dynamics of the way we do business, and the way healthcare providers find staff.
With the KHPOP grant (a block grant handed down from the feds to the states) when students called to learn about classes, but stated they could not afford the $619 all-inclusive price for the class, they would be referred to Work Force (who administered the grant) to see if they qualified. Most of the time they did and if not we would find alternatives or set up payments. Our classes were almost always full. Many Long term care, home care, even hospitals and prison health providers would bring pizza and visit with students to compel them to come work for their company. Long Term Care communities would vie to have students come for clinicals at their building in hopes of hiring them. Even though entry level health care is hard, low paying work, it is a ladder in which one can get in with a company and start working and taking additional classes to truly build a career. Those were good days, but that all changed with the end of this big grant.
So much has changed, the pandemic wreaked havoc on our healthcare system and especially our LTC (long term care) communities. Struggling to find staff, they would call us but we were struggling to secure clinical sites due to restrictions in visitations and COVID-19 outbreaks and we had no students to send them. As 2021 came to an end, vaccines help to reopen clinical sites and classes were fully back in session but securing funding for students became a real challenge. LTC communities ravaged by the pandemic now lost their perhaps their biggest stream of securing new Certified Nurse Aides and Med Aides (CNA and CMAs) many had to turn to temporary agency help to staff their communities. These Agencies charged on average 2.5 to 3 times the price per hour of what the LTC paid for their CNA employee. This put even more stress and pressure on the LTC communities, and this also led to changes.
The temporary nurse aide (TNA) provision (a quick online course only taking a handful of hours) helped but then that was ended, and all the TNA had to then take the full nurse aide program. Most of the TNA that stayed with the LTC community had their CNA course paid for by their employer as they had proved their worth and with the steep price of agency personnel many LTC communities found it better to pay for the course than to risk the student not being able to pay for the class and leave. This started LTC communities to think more seriously about hiring non-certified people off the street to come in and work doing basic tasks such as making beds, passing ice and water, and such to see if the new hire showed compassion, could show up to work on time and showed interest in the job. If so, the LTC community would pay for that person’s CNA certification. This trend has grown exponentially but the LTC communities still have not recovered from the devastating effects of the pandemic. With Kansas having an unbelievably low Medicaid reimbursement rate, they struggle to pay us, and many times they get burnt from a new employee they send to get certified just to have them jump ship to a higher paying nursing home. I really cannot blame the student as times are hard and an extra $50 a week does make a difference, but the nursing homes having to raise their hourly pay and pay for education for their staff is hard to watch. We had not raised our tuition in 3 years but were finally forced to do so which I am sure was another difficult blow to our LTC partners. There have been several LTC communities close down and I know of several more that are very close to doing so. Our enrollments are down significantly, luckily we are flexible and smart and find ways of working though and around problems. To be a nurse aide you must have a certification. This certification is 90 hours and has much regulation tied to the training criteria and while $700 or $800 may not sound like much to get a certification to begin a career, for many they look at the pay and think, why would I spend all my money on this just to make the same as working at Target or many other places….. without a good reliable payer source… they simply can’t, and thus the struggle continues.
Dianne Powell