Baltimore Alliance for Careers in Healthcare

The Baltimore Alliance for Careers in Healthcare (BACH) has two primary strategies: ensuring that the pipeline of incumbent workers and unemployed city residents moving into health care jobs is improved; and ensuring that effective strategies for retaining health care workers are identified and implemented.

BACH’s main activities include: a career mapping project with at least five area hospitals to clarify how employees in lower-skilled positions could advance to higher skilled, higher-paying jobs; career coaching in six area hospitals to reduce employee turnover and help more than 400 entry-level workers advance; and pre-allied health bridge programs designed to improve the pipeline of under-represented populations into entry-level health care jobs.

One of these bridge programs is Jobs to Careers, an initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson and Hitachi foundations designed to advance incumbent workers from certified nursing assistants to nurse extenders via a work-based learning training model.