Hawai‘i Pacific University aims to use a new grant to address a critical workforce shortage across the Islands.
The five-year, $10 million grant will allow HPU to fully fund the tuition for health care professional students who commit to working in rural Hawai‘i for five years after graduating.
“At HPU, the scholarships will support students in applied health care programs leading to licensure and practice in high-needs areas,” a recent announcement from the university noted.
According to the university, the grant is part of Hawai‘i’s Rural Health Transformation Plan, an effort supported by a $50 billion federal initiative that aims to improve health care access and services in rural communities, the announcement states.
(ICYMI: The state was recently awarded $188.9 million through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Rural Health Transformation Program.
As ASD reported in January, that funding will support a five-year Hawaiʻi Rural Health Transformation Plan focused on improving health care delivery in communities where access is limited by geography, workforce shortages and aging infrastructure. HPU’s $10 million grant is a component of the larger grant).
Hawai‘i’s health care is largely concentrated on O‘ahu although 95.1% of the state’s land area is rural, “creating major barriers for residents on Neighbor Islands and in rural O‘ahu,” the Rural Health Transformation Plan website notes.
“HPU is addressing one of the most urgent challenges facing our state — the growing shortage of health care professionals in our rural and Neighbor Island communities,” HPU President John Gotanda said in the announcement. “At Hawaiʻi Pacific University, we prepare students to apply their learning in service of our communities. This investment will allow more future health care professionals to complete their education and training and bring their skills directly where they are needed most — caring for patients across the Hawaiian Islands. It reflects the pono and kuleana that guide HPU, and it really speaks to the aloha we strive to show through action.”
Jennifer Walsh, senior vice president of strategic initiatives and chief strategy officer at HPU, told Aloha State Daily on Jan. 30 that the funding amounts to $2 million per year for five years.
“Right now, we have the flexibility to apply those dollars in areas that seem to make the most sense from a workforce need,” she says. “We are currently evaluating internally which programs we will start with, but we will have the flexibility to iterate differently each year. But it all has to be applied to the health care community in support of the rural patients that currently are often without.”
Walsh says HPU expects the scholarship to support several dozen students a year, but the total number will depend on which programs the university starts with.
“Not every program is the same duration or cost, so that’s part of the analysis that we have to do between now and April, which is when we expect to see those funds made available,” she explained. “We understand that we will have latitude to package those in a way that makes sense for the educational program.”
Scholarship amounts will differ depending on the program, Walsh says, “but by and large, it’s meant to ensure that students who are from Hawai‘i and want to stay in Hawai‘i and serve a rural community are able to get the cost of that education covered in full so they don’t have to make the difficult trade-off between not going to school or going to school for one program over another, simply because of the present financing constraints.”
As of late January, Walsh says that university was still awaiting specific language from the state as to the full range of programming that will fall within the scope of the scholarship.
HPU offers doctor of physical therapy, doctor of occupational therapy and a master of medical science physician assistant programs in its Graduate College of Health Sciences, as well as a number of undergraduate and graduate programs in its School of Nursing.
The university, she says, aims to focus on high-needs areas “where we are the only contributor in the state of Hawai‘i.”
When asked why it was important for HPU to help address these health care shortages, Walsh says the university’s core mission is to serve its communities.
“Our educational programming is aligned with the state and the community’s most pressing needs, and we’ve really taken to heart the opportunity to launch programs, again, that aren’t available elsewhere and to be able to be a part of the solution. We recognize that there are a lot of institutional providers nationally, but not everybody has the right frame of mind or missional lens to truly meet our community’s needs, and part of that has to do with just being present. We live and we work and we go to doctors in the same community that everyone is in and that helps to really shape and reinforce our commitment to being present, to living out our mission right here in our backyard.”
The state’s shortage of health care providers has been long and well documented.
According to the most recent report to the state Legislature on the findings from the Hawai‘i Physician Workforce Assessment Project, there are 12,688 licensed physicians in the state, but only 3,647 currently providing care to patients. But because not all of them practice full-time, these doctors provide the equivalent of 3,044 full-time physicians, or FTE, full-time equivalents.
Demand models, however, indicate that the state needs 3,688 FTEs of practicing doctors, a statewide shortage of 644. But when you consider the “geographic realities of specialty coverage on different islands,” that unmet need totals 833 FTEs, the report notes.
According to the report, Hawai‘i County has a shortage of 224 physicians; the City and County of Honolulu has a shortage of 379; Kaua‘i County has a shortage of 50; and Maui County has a shortage of 179.
In other health care sectors, a 2024 workforce study from the Healthcare Association of Hawai‘i found there were 34,181 non-physician health care positions in the state, of which 4,669, or 14%, were unfilled.
Registered nurses, certified nursing aids, and radiologic and ultrasound techs were among the fields with the greatest need, according to the report, which was published in early 2025.
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Stephanie Salmons can be reached at stephanie@alohastatedaily.com.
