Bank of America is investing in workforce development in healthcare across the United States by working with colleges and universities. According to a media release, in 2025, investments from Bank of America helped “6,400 individuals get connected to livable‑wage jobs and provided 265,000 people with access to training, education, and career readiness programs designed to position them for long‑term career success.”
Earlier this week, Bank of America hosted a health summit at Bakersfield College (BC) to discuss investment and employment gaps in healthcare.
“I’m here to tell you, our mission at Bank of America is to make financial lives better,” said Abigail Hollingsworth. “The best way to make financial lives better is to make sure people have good jobs. And where all of the good jobs are, or not all of them, most of the good jobs are in healthcare.”
She explained that healthcare is the number one in-demand industry across the country, with over two million current job openings paying a livable wage. He continued to say that 46 percent of healthcare workers experience burnout, and that is what leads to shortages. As people are burning out, there is also the challenge of training and recruiting new employees due to a lack of capacity or expenses.
This creates a “vicious cycle” that she said poses a huge problem for patients, as there are not enough people to care for them. The rest of the summit consisted of keynote speakers and two panels to discuss what current statistics and trends are within the healthcare system and how they can be addressed.
The next speaker at the event, Dr. Bill Woodson, made a similar statement, saying access is a number one issue in healthcare.
“So the number one issue in healthcare right now is access. No matter where you are in the United States, you can’t get in,” said Woodson. “And, I don’t care if it’s Boston or Bakersfield or I’m from Chicago, you can’t get into a specialist.
For addressing the issue in Kern County, Dr. Olga Meave from Clinica Sierra Vista spoke about training doctors in Kern. She explained that she has been in Kern for 11 years because she did her training and stayed.
“So it works, it really works, and that’s what we do at Clinica Sierra Vista,” said Meave. “We train doctors, and we encourage them to stay.”
She said that even if they do not stay with Clinica Sierra Vista, they encourage them to stay in Kern County. She also explained that the benefit of training people here, rather than trying to get them to come here later, is that they can grow to love the community.
“That way, while you’re training, you also get to know your community, you get to know community partners, you get to know the needs, the true needs of the community, because one thing is what happens in the hospital, and another thing is what happens before,” said Meave.
Adding to the need for doctors, Meave stated that in 2025, California needed over 6000 new doctors. Because that was not being met, it is expected that by 2030, the state will need two or three times more, according to Meave.
“When I say two to three times more, it depends on the current workforce, because not everybody’s gonna continue working full time because they’re burned out, not everybody’s gonna be healthy enough, because we also need sick. So we’re gonna have to decrease our hours of operation,” said Meave.
There is also a need for more nurses. Meave stated that nurses are needed 24/7, whereas doctors go home at the end of their shifts. Because of this, she explained that data shows California will need over 61,000 nurses.
“We all need to work together to make sure that the supply is meeting the demand and it’s at the right place at the right time. We have five geriatricians in Kern County. That’s pretty scary,” said Meave. “We’re all gonna need that care in the future. So, we’d better start training some doctors to become geriatricians.”
Across Kern County, other organizations are also taking steps to invest in workforce development. In a roundtable discussion titled: Building Kern County’s Future Healthcare Ecosystem, speakers discussed the investments they are making and how they’re measuring long-term impact.
The speakers mentioned funding and assisting with residency and nursing programs, but Emily Duran from Kern Family Health Care also spoke to the need for non-physician positions.
“From our organizational perspective, I think almost everyone up here, minus one, is not a physician. So we also need non-physicians to understand our work,” said Duran. “Through our office, we process 6 million claims a year. And what does that mean? That means revenue. That means patient care. That means we need to process timely so that all of our hospitals here and all of your organizations and healthcare organizations actually have the funding to do what you do best, which is provide care to our members.”
Dr. Puja Vithalani represented Kaiser Permanente during the discussion and stated she came to Kern County 15 years ago to do her residency at Kern Medical and stayed. Since then, she has also persuaded other doctors to move to Kern. Word of mouth between doctors is a part of a recruitment strategy for Kaiser, along with partnering with residency programs in Kern County.
The summit also addressed that, prior to residency and recruitment, the first step is training the talent; therefore, they held a discussion titled: Addressing Talent Pipeline Gaps. The panel consisted of local educational leaders from K-12 grades through college.
Kimberly Graham from the Kern County Superintendent of Schools (KCSOS) stated that they launched a healthcare academy last summer to give high school students early exposure to the healthcare career. She explained that through partnerships with Dignity Health and Bakersfield college they were able to offer both hands-on experience and dual enrollment, with the students getting CPR certified.
Jacey Cooper from Precision Health Strategies, LLC, addressed changes that are happening to healthcare on federal and state levels, including the HR1 bill that was passed in 2025, cutting 1 trillion dollars over ten years from Medicaid. Cooper noted that is progbale the biggest change since the Affordable Care Act (ACA) passed.
“It’s anywhere from 10 to 16 million people that will lose access to healthcare, and that’s based on current federal projections,” said Cooper.
For MediCal specifically, she explained that California estimates a 30 billion dollar annual cut to the budget, meaning 3 to 4 million people will lose access to healthcare.
However, MediCal costs continue to rise due to per-person costs driven by increases in benefits provided and rates paid to providers.
She stated that, according to 2023 statistics, for people without health insurance and at the federal poverty level, 93% of their income would go to healthcare.
‘Even if they are at the top of the federal property level, 93% of that would have to go to healthcare to afford what it costs. I mean, you can’t pay rent, you can’t buy food. You can’t pay for child care. That’s why it’s unaffordable. That is why Medicaid exists to begin with,” said Cooper.
Cooper discussed that before the ACA, counties had an obligation of $17,000 to cover the uninsured, as long as they met the poverty level. She stated that although many programs for this were dismantled under the ACA, they remain on the books and could resume. Counties will have to review the budget to determine what it would cost now to do that and what they’d need from the state to make it happen.
Connecting back to the other speakers, Cooper noted that it will be important to provide opportunities to ensure people meet any community engagement requirements for care.
“I think it’s really important to think about the opportunities here. This is a great conversation today, in light of the partnerships that will be needed for this. You need to make sure there are opportunities for training, for education, for jobs, in order to make sure individuals who need to comply with community engagements are able to access those,” said Cooper.
