Rhode Island’s Caring Workforce

Rhode Island’s caring professions, from medical professionals and home health workers to nursing home staff, behavioral health providers, childcare workers, and social-service professionals, represent nearly 20% of the state’s private-sector employment. This is the state’s largest private-sector industry.

This Labor Day, we rightly recognize the people who provide direct care every day. But another workforce serves behind the scenes to make their work possible: the employees of the State of Rhode Island.

Across state agencies, public servants help plan, regulate, fund, train, license, connect, and support the people who deliver critical health and human services.

Building a workforce system

At RDW Group, we are fortunate to work alongside state teams on an array of initiatives vital to Rhode Islanders’ quality of life. Efforts are coordinated across Departments of Health (RIDOH); Human Services (DHS); Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals (BHDDH); Education (RIDE); Labor and Training (DLT); and the Rhode Island Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS).

The state’s role in the caring workforce is easy to overlook since much of the work happens behind the scenes. To name several, but not all:

EOHHS has a Workforce Planning and Implementation Initiative focused on helping Rhode Island attract, train, retain, and sustain its workforce. More than 600 public- and private-sector partners have participated.

One recent major EOHHS initiative we supported directly is Caring Careers, a comprehensive resource for education, training, and job listings. The program website features an excellent career pathway search tool.

Another is Ladders to Licensure, designed to increase the capacity and diversity of the health professional workforce by funding partnerships between healthcare providers, institutions of higher education, and others.

DHS is focused on coordination and innovation in the state’s early childhood development system , including the building and supporting the childcare workforce.

RIDOH has direct staff working across the state to ensure a healthy Rhode Island licenses doctors, nurses, and many other health professionals, as well as healthcare facilities. These responsibilities directly affect the supply of qualified workers. Educational requirements, examinations, and continuing education influence how quickly someone enters a profession or advances within it.

RIDOH and EOHHS are collaborating on the Rural Health Transformation Program to strengthen Rhode Island’s 18 designated rural communities (and designated tribal communities) by improving healthcare access, quality, and outcomes.

DLT and the Governor’s Workforce Board support registered apprenticeships, training and learning, and career-center services. Healthcare is among the fields supported through registered apprenticeships.

RIDE’s career and tech hubs are also helping learners discover the wide-range of career options available to them, including healthcare and human services, and assess the most effective and efficient educational pathways.

Finally, EOHHS and DLT have created a Health Workforce Data Dashboard that brings together information on licensed professionals, employment, earnings, demographics, education and training, and employer settings across 38 licensed health professions, along with physician and APRN specialties.

Each of these initiatives and their respective teams deserve increased awareness and acknowledgment.

We can build on this foundation

Clearly, Rhode Island has important pieces of a health and human service workforce system already in place. As communicators, we see opportunities to build on this foundation and make the pathways into caring careers clearer, more accessible, and more compelling.

1. Make caring careers easier to see. That means showing what careers are available, what they pay, how long training takes, where people can work, and how they can advance. The state’s Caring Careers initiative provides a foundation. A more visible, consumer-oriented recruitment effort can make those opportunities much easier to find and understand.
2. Embracing APPs. The future of healthcare is not just high-tech medicine but also the primary role of advanced practice providers (APP) such as physician assistants and nurse practitioners. Understanding and appreciating their role will make these career pathways more desirable.   
3. Make it possible to enter the pipeline. For many prospective workers, the barrier is not a lack of interest but the cost of becoming qualified. Tuition assistance, paid apprenticeships and clinical placements, training stipends, childcare and transportation assistance can make the difference between considering a career and pursuing one. Similarly, for many lower-paid health and human-services workers, the challenge isn’t simply finding a job. It’s making work sustainable. Childcare, transportation, housing, scheduling, and financial pressures influence whether someone can enter and remain in the workforce.
4. Use Medicaid as a workforce lever. Reimbursement rates impact provider ability to recruit and retain the workers Rhode Islanders need. The potential is already evident. In 2025, EOHHS awarded $6.7 million to 85 primary-care practices to support recruitment, retention, and capacity.
5. Make licensing faster and more portable. Licensing protects quality and public safety. Continuing to make the applicant experience frictionless through faster processing, reciprocity, recognition of comparable credentials, accessible testing, and application systems will help qualified workers enter the workforce more quickly.

The workforce as one system

Perhaps the biggest opportunity is to recognize that Rhode Island’s healthcare and human-services employers are part of the same workforce ecosystem. Instead of asking each organization to solve the workforce challenge alone, the state can provide a platform for collaboration.

Shared recruitment campaigns, career pathways, training, clinical placements, internships, apprenticeships, and other workforce infrastructure could help employers work together instead of competing for the same limited pool of workers.

A Labor Day thank-you

The State of Rhode Island doesn’t employ most of the people who make up our healthcare and human-services workforce. But state employees help shape the conditions that allow that workforce to succeed.

So, this Labor Day, as we recognize the people who care for Rhode Islanders, let’s also recognize the public servants working behind the scenes to help ensure there are enough people to provide this care. They are part of the caring workforce, too.