To find workers, hospitals are training teenagers

Ballad Health has a $70 million problem.

Like many rural hospitals, the Tennessee-based health system struggles to recruit workers, forcing it to pay traveling nurses tens of millions of dollars every year to fill the gaps.

It also thinks it has a solution: train more local high-school students to join its ranks. The idea is catching on elsewhere, too, as health systems struggle to find enough workers to care for an aging population.

Nationwide, hospitals are confronting a shortage of everything from aides to doctors that has strained many wards and emergency rooms. Even as the labor market has softened, healthcare jobs have stayed plentiful: People spend on healthcare in good times and bad, and thus far, the ability to change bedpans and insert IVs hasn’t been automated.

Human resources advisory firm Mercer projects a deficit of 100,000 healthcare workers by 2028, mostly among nursing assistants, while the aging population drives up demand.

Ballad is trying to create a local labor pool by working with five northeast Tennessee school districts to train teenagers. The first batch of 200 students will graduate in 2029 with their licensed practical nurse credentials and be eligible to work right away at Ballad, earning $23 an hour.

“Our intention is to employ them," said Ballad Chief Executive Alan Levine. The program is also a steppingstone for students who want to pursue more advanced medical training, which Levine said Ballad would help pay for.

At the Houston school, students can prepare for careers in fields such as medical imaging and physical therapy.

Conditions have improved since the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when Ballad lost nearly half of its bedside nurses. Still, it had to pay $70 million in the last fiscal year to bring in traveling nurses—who are costlier than those on staff—even after hiking pay and benefits.

“The shortage is acute," Levine said, adding that it leads to longer patient wait times in both emergency rooms and other care settings.

Ballad is getting help from Bloomberg Philanthropy, which last year announced it was pumping $250 million into 10 programs in states including Tennessee, Texas and North Carolina to create a high school-to-healthcare pipeline.

Another healthcare-focused high school, the Northwell School of Health Sciences in New York City, also just launched this school year with 240 students. More efforts are taking root in other states and cities, too, as hospitals tap local schools to try to solve their worker shortages.

These moves are part of a larger shift back to vocational education in the U.S., fueled by a desire among educators to get students started sooner on career paths that interest them. Labor-strapped industries are eager for the help, while many students have grown skeptical of pricey college degrees.

“College is a very expensive career exploration program," said Brooke Rice, vice president of curriculum and work-based learning at NAF, an education nonprofit that in 2013 launched a high-school curriculum focused on teaching students about healthcare careers. That program now serves around 18,000 students at 100 high schools around the country.

Students at Ballad Health Academy get hands-on classroom training using hospital equipment to prepare them for healthcare careers.Emma Smith says she joined a Ballad nursing program in Tennessee to kick-start her career.

For Emma Smith, 15 years old, enrolling in the Ballad nursing program was a no-brainer. “I get a kick-start on my career," said Smith, a sophomore at Greeneville High School in eastern Tennessee.

Smith now spends hours every week in a classroom with mannequins and hospital beds, in addition to taking classes including Spanish and AP English. She plans to use her credentials from Ballad to start healthcare work while she also pursues a college degree to become a labor and delivery nurse.

In the Houston area, the region’s growing population also fuels the need for more health workers, said Bryan Sisk, chief nursing executive at Memorial Hermann Health System. Their Health Education and Learning High School, which opened at an existing Houston school last year, lets students choose career paths such as medical imaging, physical therapy and pharmacy technician roles.

By the time they graduate, students will have spent 220 hours doing clinical rotations inside Memorial Hermann’s facilities and will be eligible for jobs there. Starting salaries range between roughly $40,000 to $80,000 a year. Demand quickly exceeded available slots at the school, which currently enrolls 309 students.

“All my middle-school years, I really didn’t like going to school—I hated it," said Brianna Castillo, a sophomore at the high school who hopes to become an ultrasound tech. Now, though, the 15-year-old said she is eager to show up because she believes it will help advance her career.

High-school students are being targeted as future recruits by healthcare employers such as Memorial Hermann in Houston.Interest in the Houston school, which offers the chance to do clinical rotations with Memorial Hermann, has been high.

Research suggests that students who enroll in classes with a focus on career and technical training tend to perform better academically and have higher attendance rates.

In some ways, the new high schools are a throwback to the days when hospitals ran their own nursing programs, as they did a half-century ago, said Janet Coffman, a professor at the Institute for Health Policy Studies, at the University of California, San Francisco. Hospitals have closed many such programs in recent decades, in part to save money, she said.

Filling nursing jobs isn’t the only challenge. Baystate Health, a western Massachusetts-based system, also uses a high-school career program it has run since 2006 to find new recruits for jobs such as respiratory therapist and sterile processing technician. Many participants have gone on to pursue additional training, and more than 900 have ended up working for Baystate in the past decade.

“A lot of these careers are very attainable but people don’t know about them," said Peter Blain, Baystate’s workforce development manager.

At the brand-new Northwell school in New York, students pick from four career paths in their sophomore year. They will get workplace credentials in fields such as pre-nursing and healthcare management.

“You can’t sit and wait to see who shows up," said Michael Dowling, the former CEO.

Write to Te-Ping Chen at Te-ping.Chen@wsj.com