Charting the State of Healthcare in the High Country

The healthcare industry is a behemoth, not only here in North Carolina, but across the nation and the globe for that matter.

I challenge you to find the headlines of any day on the calendar and not find a story about healthcare in there in some way, shape or form.

The jobs in this industry, safe and highly necessary.

Technological advancements will only further the opportunities for care and discovery and the skills needed for those positions look different than they did years ago.

Watauga County and really all of Western North Carolina, for that matter, are well positioned to train the workforce needed to fill the health care jobs of today and tomorrow and hopefully keep some of those folks in a rural setting where the needs are great and the business model is complex.

Sharon Decker of Grow NC, one of the key authors of the state's recently released economic recovery plan for Western North Carolina, talks about the need for workforce development in this key sector.

We need health care providers.

You heard it today from Nathan, but it's the number one need.

So grateful for the great work being done at Caldwell and other community colleges with a focus on workforce, a priority on health care, but not just focusing there.

How do we build the career track starting in middle school for our young people so they see the opportunities that they have for a diversity of careers in Western North Carolina? We must diversify this economy today.

We now have been through two seasons in my lifetime where a lack of diversification has been disastrous.

Textiles and furniture, too heavily invested in those single areas of manufacturing.

We all experienced that.

I came to Western North Carolina into Rutherford County, managed a textile operation there, one of the last in the county that no longer exists.

So we weren't diversified enough.

And then what's happened now with Helene is tourism.

We haven't diversified enough in our beautiful mountain communities.

Tourism is critically important to North Carolina's success.

Critically important.

We need to keep cultivating it.

But we can't get solely focused on individual industries that if crisis hits, we can't find diversity and other opportunities.

We talked earlier about Watauga High School's strong CTE program that has been enhanced by Rise Caldwell Watauga, which placed Watauga students in paid apprenticeships at UNC Health Appalachian just this year.

It's a great funnel into a robust network of community colleges on this side of the state.

11 of them, in fact, including Caldwell Community College, which recently made a multimillion dollar investment in training labs for healthcare careers on its Watauga campus.

And then, of course, there's App State, one of several four-year schools here in the West that have placed an emphasis on health care career paths.

The healthcare industry is a behemoth, not only here in North Carolina, but across the nation and the globe for that matter.

I challenge you to find the headlines of any day on the calendar and not find a story about healthcare in there in some way, shape or form.

The jobs in this industry, safe and highly necessary.

Technological advancements will only further the opportunities for care and discovery and the skills needed for those positions look different than they did years ago.

Watauga County and really all of Western North Carolina, for that matter, are well positioned to train the workforce needed to fill the health care jobs of today and tomorrow and hopefully keep some of those folks in a rural setting where the needs are great and the business model is complex.

Sharon Decker of Grow NC, one of the key authors of the state's recently released economic recovery plan for Western North Carolina, talks about the need for workforce development in this key sector.

We need health care providers.

You heard it today from Nathan, but it's the number one need.

So grateful for the great work being done at Caldwell and other community colleges with a focus on workforce, a priority on health care, but not just focusing there.

How do we build the career track starting in middle school for our young people so they see the opportunities that they have for a diversity of careers in Western North Carolina? We must diversify this economy today.

We now have been through two seasons in my lifetime where a lack of diversification has been disastrous.

Textiles and furniture, too heavily invested in those single areas of manufacturing.

We all experienced that.

I came to Western North Carolina into Rutherford County, managed a textile operation there, one of the last in the county that no longer exists.

So we weren't diversified enough.

And then what's happened now with Helene is tourism.

We haven't diversified enough in our beautiful mountain communities.

Tourism is critically important to North Carolina's success.

Critically important.

We need to keep cultivating it.

But we can't get solely focused on individual industries that if crisis hits, we can't find diversity and other opportunities.

We talked earlier about Watauga High School's strong CTE program that has been enhanced by Rise Caldwell Watauga, which placed Watauga students in paid apprenticeships at UNC Health Appalachian just this year.

It's a great funnel into a robust network of community colleges on this side of the state.

11 of them, in fact, including Caldwell Community College, which recently made a multimillion dollar investment in training labs for healthcare careers on its Watauga campus.

And then, of course, there's App State, one of several four-year schools here in the West that have placed an emphasis on health care career paths.