How a National Healthcare Training Program’s Impacts Vary Locally

The HPOG Program and its evaluation will make an important contribution to the field’s collective knowledge about sector-based and career pathways programs. This brief intends to inform HPOG grantees, policymakers, and the healthcare workforce field about how HPOG 2.0’s impacts vary across local programs. The brief makes technical appendix material from the impact evaluation accessible to program administrators and staff as a means to helping them understand their program-specific impacts in the context of the larger, national impact study.

Analyses reported in this brief show:

• Collectively, the local HPOG 2.0 programs—and most of them individually—improve educational progress in the short term.
• Collectively, the local HPOG 2.0 programs—and about half of them individually—increase the number of months in training.
• In the short term, the HPOG 2.0 programs modestly increase healthcare employment.
• In the short term, one of the local HPOG 2.0 programs increases earnings, one decreases earnings, and the evidence is ambiguous for the rest.

The HPOG 2.0 evaluation uses an experimental design, where those eligible for HPOG are randomized into a treatment or control group such that the difference in their outcomes is the program’s estimated impact. The brief is based on the HPOG 2.0 evaluation’s analysis of program-specific impacts, which uses Bayesian statistical methods. Data come from the evaluation’s baseline and follow-up participant surveys as well as from the National Directory of New Hires.

Explanations for why local program impacts vary are speculative, and include reasons such as: length of supported programs; screening of applicants, or specific types of participants served; instructional quality; quality, availability, and use of various support services; alignment of offered programs with local labor demand and wages; and availability of alternative training programs. Future research will consider further how these factors associate with local impacts.

Peck, Laura R., David Judkins, and Stanislav Kolenikov. (2022). How a National Healthcare Training Program’s Impacts Vary Locally. OPRE Report 2022-38. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.