La. Admin. Code tit. 28 § LXIX-301

Current through Register Vol. 50, No. 11, November 20, 2024

Section LXIX-301 - Background Context

A. The National Health Care Skill Standards Project brought together an innovative group of health, industry, labor, and educational organizations to develop skill standards for health care workers. The project, conducted in 19921996, was directed by WestEd (formerly Far West Laboratory). As one of the original 22 pilot projects sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor and Education to identify skill standards for different industries, WestEd partnered with a host of organizations, including the National Consortium of Health Science and Technology Education, the Service Employees International Union, and over 100 industry and education organizations. These diverse groups were convened with the goal of improving the nation's health care system by identifying and disseminating information on those skills required to deliver high quality health care.

B. Over the past 10 years, health care has been one of the nation's fastest growing industries, currently accounting for approximately 13 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product. According to recent reports of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over nine percent of the total workforce is employed in the health care field. Rapid technological and biomedical advances have made the U.S. health care system the finest in the world. Yet it faces many challenges in the decades ahead, including an increasingly diverse client population, remodeled delivery systems, and new technology. To meet such challenges, health services of tomorrow must be radically different from those of today. Inpatient care will come to mean "intensive care." If current trends continue, most care will be delivered in outpatient centers or even in the client's home.

C. The decade of the 1990's has brought increasing awareness that revisions in health care delivery and financing are needed. Health care reform proposals have been written at the national, state, and organizational levels all across the nation. The ultimate goal is to deliver quality care at a price society can afford. To achieve this goal, one element of health care reform stands out as fundamental and essential: the education and training of the nation's over 10 million health care workers. Their level of knowledge and skill is critical. The National Health Care Skills Standards Project was a cooperative effort that resulted in national standards for the health care industry. These standards describe skills essential and appropriate for workers in health services. Furthermore, it has provided important information on how these standards can be tailored and implemented for local use in a variety of industry and educational applications. Educational institutions can apply the standards as a framework for linking academic curricula to actual teaching practices, school-to-work, secondary education to post-secondary education, and students to their community. In using the standards to develop curricula and assessments, educators can be confident that their students are well-prepared to find jobs and to be successful in building careers.

La. Admin. Code tit. 28, § LXIX-301

Promulgated by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, LR 29:2666 (December 2003).

AUTHORITY NOTE: Promulgated in accordance with R.S.6(A)(10) and R.S. 17:10.