Health Workforce Policy: IHPS + IMPACT Policy Skills Series
Elizabeth Mertz, PhD
Ulrike Muench, RN, PhD, FAAN
Professors Mertz and Muench will provide an overview of the health workforce in the United States and will discuss the roles of the federal government and state governments in health professions education and health workforce development.
Ulrike Muench is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the School of Nursing and she is affiliated faculty at the UCSF Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies. As a nurse, nurse practitioner, and health services researcher, her program of research is centered on the nursing workforce. She has over a decade of experience conducting studies on the nursing labor market, evaluating health policies, and assessing the contributions of nurse practitioners across diverse settings and populations. Her research interests include populations living with dementia, opioid use disorder, serious mental illness, and those experiencing chronic pain.
She has expertise working with Medicare and other administrative claims databases and numerous large survey data, including the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), Current Population Survey (CPS), American Community Survey (ACS), American Time Use Survey (ATUS), National Sample Survey or Registered Nurses (NSSRN) and many others. Her research has been published in leading health care journals, including JAMA, NEJM, and Health Affairs.
Dr. Muench trained as a registered nurse in the UK and completed her nurse practitioner training in Adult and Women’s health at Yale University. Her doctoral degree is also from Yale with a focus on health policy and health care systems. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt University before joining UCSF.
Elizabeth Mertz is associate director of research at Healthforce Center at the University of California, San Francisco. In this role, she is responsible for developing new research opportunities and cultivating faculty connections. She is a professor at the UCSF School of Dentistry's Department of Preventive and Restorative Dental Sciences with a joint appointment in the UCSF School of Nursing's Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. She is also affiliated with the UCSF Center to Address Disparities in Children’s Oral Health (CANDO) and the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at UCSF.
Mertz’s work covers a broad range of health workforce issues primarily focused on dental care, including supply and demand of providers, health care regulation, state and federal workforce policy, delivery system design and finance, access to care, and evolving professional practice models. She works at many levels to assist organizations and individuals to understand, research, and address the challenges facing our oral health care system. Mertz's teaching goal is to help her students understand how health policy, health services research, and sociological issues impact the dental delivery system through immersive hands-on projects that require critical thinking and analysis of current events. Mertz has also served on numerous advisory and planning committees for federal and state agencies, as well as nonprofit and philanthropic organizations.