Earlier this week, the Arizona Senate Committee on Health and Human Services held their first meeting of the 2024 legislative session. Members unanimously passed all four bills that were up for discussion.
With three of the four bills up for consideration relating to the healthcare workforce, the members discussed the state’s workforce shortage and potential solutions to it.
“Arizona ranks ninth in the nation as having the most health professional shortage areas,” said LIbby De Bie, CEO of the Arizona Medical Association. “More than 40 percent of all Arizonans currently live in a health professional shortage area. This is especially concerning given Arizona is the fourteenth most populous state in the nation.”
De Bie said the field of nursing has the biggest need. While the state had a total of 58,914 registered nurses in 2022, DeBie projected a shortage of 4,679 by 2032. The state has taken various steps to address this shortage, including through the Arizona Nurse Education Investment Pilot Program in 2022 and the Transition to Practice Program last spring. The latter is a program that provides professional development through structure and additional support—that go beyond the clinicals needed to transition into the healthcare workforce—for newly graduated registered nurses.
“Even with these areas of focus over the last couple of years, we know more needs to be done and it must be better,” De Bie said, noting that over 23 percent of all registered nurses leave their current positions within the first year of employment. “That is a significantly high turnover rate.”
Lawmakers approved Senate Bill 1019, which would appropriate $5 million from Arizona’s general fund in the 2024-2025 fiscal year to the Arizona Health Innovation Trust Fund. The fund provides education, mentoring, and support to individuals in the health innovation sector, and programs that support workforce development. Joan Koerber-Walker, president and CEO of AZBio, spoke on the importance of the fund for Arizona universities.
“The Arizona Innovation Trust Fund is building a bridge between the research that happens at our universities, our hospitals, and our research institutions, and the hospitals and patients that need the treatments and cures,” Koerber-Walker said.
Koerber-Walker said building that bridge requires three things: training workforce with new technologies, allowing entrepreneurs to use their skills to turn ideas into products that help patients, and high-risk early stage funding—which is when an idea or initiative received funding but has yet to be proven effective, or after the government provides start-up funds and prior to when investors do. Koerber-Walker said if this bridge cannot be built, neither will treatments or cures.
SB 1043 also passed the committee and would allow genetic counselors to become licensed for a two-year period. Committee Chairman TJ Shope (R — Pinal County) said this bill, which he is the primary sponsor of, had come up in previous years, but when COVID-19 happened, it was forgotten.
“This is entirely a voluntary opt-in registry,” Shope said.
According to Shope, the licensure would help the public identify qualified genetic counselor providers, and would allow out-of-state providers to gain recognition for their ability to practice in Arizona.
SB 1050 was the final bill to receive a unanimous vote and would incorporate CTs and MRIs into the imaging list of diagnostic procedures chiropractors may perform.
“We do a lot of work with scope of practice …there’s a scope that [doctors must] perform in, but there’s also statute that needs to be updated, and with all of the changes and all of the innovations we have currently with medicine, this is going to allow the board to adopt rules that are necessary in order for the doctors to be able to prescribe imaging, not just X-rays,” said Sen. Janae Shamp (R — Maricopa County).
The committee also passed SB 1024 during the meeting, which would expand the definition of developmental disability to include spina bifida, which would have a one-time cost of $370,000 from the general fund, unanimously passed.