HealthForce Kentucky aims to meet regional healthcare needs
Published 6:00 am Friday, April 11, 2025
Students at the Logan County Career & Technical Center work in the nonprofit HealthForce Kentucky's mobile simulation center, HealthForce One, in March. (SUBMITTED)
Students at the Logan County Career & Technical Center work in the nonprofit HealthForce Kentucky's mobile simulation center, HealthForce One, in March. (SUBMITTED)
Students at the Logan County Career & Technical Center work in the nonprofit HealthForce Kentucky's mobile simulation center, HealthForce One, in March. (SUBMITTED)
Students at the Logan County Career & Technical Center work in the nonprofit HealthForce Kentucky's mobile simulation center, HealthForce One, in March. (SUBMITTED)
Students at the Logan County Career & Technical Center work in the nonprofit HealthForce Kentucky's mobile simulation center, HealthForce One, in March. (SUBMITTED)
DAVID MAMARIL HOROWITZ
david.horowitz@bgdailynews.com
High school students retrieve organs from a synthetic cadaver. Some handle forceps to simulate surgery on an artificial abdomen. Others analyze life-like mannequins of human anatomy — able to assess its vision, see its bruising and swelling, and listen to sounds from its lungs, heart and abdominal organs.
It’s a simulation center on wheels, transported from Owensboro atop a semi-truck trailer. Operated by the nonprofit HealthForce Kentucky, the center last month served students of the Logan, Russellville and Todd school districts at the Logan County Career & Technical Center.
“We were able to learn about different things such as the heart, the lungs, human body organs and muscles, CPR, geriatric patients, and down syndrome patients,” Logan County High School senior Kaylee Chandler said.
HealthForce Kentucky is bringing this kind of high-tech medical equipment to its service area — a regional collaboration of nine post-secondary educational institutions and 16 Western Kentucky counties. The aim, according to HealthForce Kentucky Chancellor Barton Darrell, is to introduce students to the diversity of healthcare professions and ultimately help fill the region’s healthcare workforce shortage — as of March, he said, the nonprofit has provided likely more than 12,000 individual experiences to introduce students across ages to healthcare professions without charging them.
Institutions within this collaboration can reserve from the nonprofit’s two simulation labs and rent from its vast supply of high-tech medical equipment, currently subsidized by the state; HealthForce Kentucky, appropriated $38 million in initial funding from the state legislature, is also building a high-tech, 35,000-square-foot Owensboro simulation center slated for completion in November.
In southcentral Kentucky, the nonprofit has served both the Logan and Edmonson school districts, has planned to serve the Butler district later this month, and has scheduled for one of its mobile labs to serve adolescents through a summer camp at WKU’s main campus.
“I think this equalizes the opportunities between rural and urban counties — that we bring the high-touch environment for students to have a field trip locally and afford them an opportunity and their teachers to have the opportunity to experience or contribute to the curriculum while introducing pathways and pipelines in healthcare to those learners that may not have known about these options in the past,” HealthForce Kentucky President and CEO Bruce Williams said.
Eventually, certain costs will be embedded into the degree programs and the certificate programs, Darrell said.
HealthForce Kentucky’s board of directors also has an academic affairs committee that facilitates communication among the institutions that are part of the collaboration, Darrell said. This allows the institutions to collaborate — sharing resources and programs without the additional expense of creating programs that would be duplicative in the region.
“It’s a pretty big deal,” said Western Kentucky University Dean of the College of Health and Human Services Tania Basta, who represents WKU on the nonprofit’s board. “This is one of the first partnerships of this magnitude that I know of among this many schools.”
Logan County Career & Technical Center
The experience at LCCTC — with the organ retrieval, abdominal surgery, mannequin assessments, and more — provided students exposure to supplies and equipment normally not available, LCCTC nursing/health teacher Marcy Duncan said.
Students broke out into eight sections at once and rotated through them, as at least five staff explained the center’s features and fielded questions.
“It was just a wonderful opportunity, to just have the students … maybe open their eyes to different career options, different career paths that there are available,” Duncan said.
The mobile lab, HealthForce One, was there for three full days of classes and for a fourth day so 10th graders could tour. Duncan intends to request the center at least once in spring and in fall.
WKU, and Camp CARE
HealthForce Kentucky has allocated dollars to partner universities to enhance or grow current programs or add new ones, with nearly $500,000 provided to WKU, Basta said. The university, which plans on developing a CRNA (certified registered nurse anesthetist) program in Bowling Green and Owensboro, intends to use the funds to design a space within the upcoming Owensboro simulation center specifically serving that program at the regional Owensboro campus.
In southcentral Kentucky, one of HealthForce Kentucky’s mobile labs will also serve WKU’s Camp CARE, a relatively new summer camp intended to introduce adolescents to different healthcare specialties.
Mark Flener, a WKU School of Nursing faculty member, founded the weeklong camp last summer, which had encompassed 25 students over a week. In addition to evening team-building activities, the camp offers around six and a half hours of presentations and activities daily, and it features experts across different healthcare professions, Flener said — and this time, the mobile lab will be a new feature serving two 50-student cohorts.
The lab, Flener added, is like a hospital on wheels — which circumvents the challenge of navigating patient privacy at a real hospital.
“There’s some technology, resources there that most schools would not have,” Flener said. “It definitely brings big technology into small, rural areas of Kentucky that would not be able to experience it.”
