AdventHealth University President C. Josef Ghosn, EdD, believes developing the healthcare workforce of the future starts with viewing training as a “social justice imperative” — one that relies on strategic community partnerships to make college education and entry into healthcare more accessible.
In a conversation with Becker’s, Dr. Ghosn outlined how AHU — a health sciences university founded by Altamonte Springs, Fla.-based AdventHealth — is aligning its curriculum, partnerships and culture with this in mind.
AHU, which is based in Orlando, Fla., with two small satellite campuses — one in Tampa, Fla., and one in Denver — is first and foremost focused on producing a qualified clinical workforce for AdventHealth. Approximately 80% of AHU graduates take jobs at the health system and approximately 20% take jobs within other organizations.
“There is great demand from the healthcare system for clinicians,” Dr. Ghosn said. “The challenge is creating market demand for people to major in those majors. There are two kinds of demands. There’s a demand that the healthcare system has — and this is undeniable — they need clinicians. But the market, where the students come from — that’s where we have some challenges whereby there are not enough students wanting to major in those majors, especially on the undergraduate level.”
He attributed this challenge, in part, to high schools not producing enough graduates.
“And when they [do] produce those graduates, we are finding that many times they are not well-prepared in the science area. So, they require a lot of remedial courses in order to enter professional programs, whether it is sonography or radiography, nursing or [another major],” Dr. Ghosn said.
AHU also faces challenges recruiting faculty to grow its programs, as salaries in higher education often cannot compete with those offered for clinical practice positions within healthcare organizations.
Despite these and other challenges, AHU has been successful in growing its programs, Dr. Ghosn said. He noted that the partnership with AdventHealth has been crucial.
“We depend on the healthcare system to say, ‘This is the major we need,'” he said. “We don’t establish majors. We don’t start programs here at the university unless the healthcare system says there is demand for that major.”
He said AdventHealth also has a consumer promise in the market to deliver whole-person care, leading AHU to focus its curriculum on whole-person education. This education is built on four platforms: well-being, belongingness, fulfillment and purpose.
“We integrated the concept of well-being, belongingness, fulfillment and purpose in all our curriculum — starting with the nursing curriculum, and that is one of the largest ones we have here,” Dr. Ghosn said. “It is fully deployed in nursing. It is currently being deployed in the healthcare administration program. It is migrating to other graduate programs we have at the university — that whole-person education.
“The goal of it is to prepare individuals not only qualified in their clinical area — and we want them to be qualified, obviously, everybody has to pass the licensure exams — but we [also] want them to deliver whole-person care. … We want them to believe that there’s a purpose, and there is a purpose beyond making a salary and making a living — a purpose to deliver whole-person care.”
One example he pointed to of how AHU achieves this mission is through tuition assistance and full-ride nursing scholarships for team member dependents. This allows AHU to support qualified students who face financial barriers.
“And because our students do almost 100% of their clinicals at one of our hospitals in AdventHealth, they become very acquainted with the hospital system, with the culture of the hospital, with the managers leading operations in the hospital,” Dr. Ghosn said. “So when they graduate here, they have seen how the system runs, and their onboarding with AdventHealth takes shorter than a graduate from another university.”
He recommended that health systems offer clinicals within their own systems so students can practice and become familiar with the organization. “That’s how they’re going to attract good talent, and that’s how they’re going to invite people to come work with them after they graduate,” he added.
He also pointed to the importance of communication — specifically, communication to understand the health needs in the communities organizations serve, to help meet those needs. He equated it to the difference between sales and marketing.
“Sales is when you produce a product and you go to the market trying to sell it to the market — convince the market they need that product that you produced,” Dr. Ghosn said. “Marketing is you go to the market, ask what kind of a product you need, you go back, you produce that product, and then you’re not selling anymore. That’s what we do [at AHU].”
He said health systems must educate higher education institutions in their areas as to what their needs are. Then the higher education system, he said, needs to produce the product that is needed by the healthcare system.
“And once you produce the product that is needed by the healthcare system, then you’re not selling anymore — you are just letting them know the product is here,” he said.
“In our case, the product the healthcare system has asked us for — one, qualified clinicians in certain areas, so we graduate those people in those areas. And two, we want those graduates to be able to deliver whole-person care. So, it is not just the clinical qualification — also the cultural orientation. That’s the whole person. So, we produce both. The students will have both. And that’s the collaboration between the healthcare system and the university that allows us to stay in tune with the market and understand what the needs of the market are to produce the right product.”
In April, AHU graduated 569 students, including its inaugural Doctor of Nursing graduates. It currently has approximately 2,000 students in the Orlando market.
