Building and Sustaining the Community-Based Healthcare Workforce: An Integrated Talent Management Model
Michal J. Plavsa
ABSTRACT
Community health workers, peer supporters, case managers, and other behavioral health paraprofessionals are increasingly important to community-based healthcare delivery. Although a growing evidence base supports the value of these workers, healthcare organizations continue to face challenges related to recruitment, role clarity, workforce integration, supervision, professional development, career advancement, and retention. Existing literature addresses many of these workforce functions independently, providing limited guidance for integrating them across the employee lifecycle. This article synthesizes evidence from community-based workforce development and healthcare talent management literature to propose the Integrated Talent Management Lifecycle for Community-Based Healthcare, an evidence-informed conceptual model for building, developing, and sustaining this workforce. The model integrates 10 interconnected lifecycle stages, from strategic workforce planning through workforce sustainability, within nine cross-cutting foundational principles. It provides a structured approach for examining workforce practices as an integrated organizational system and for translating those practices into organizational action, measurement, and continuous improvement. Because the model has not yet been empirically validated, a phased research agenda is proposed to examine its content validity, feasibility, measurement, relationships with workforce and organizational outcomes, and applicability across community-based healthcare settings. The model offers a framework for moving workforce strategy beyond recruitment toward the development of organizational systems capable of supporting long-term workforce sustainability.
