 What makes for excellence in heart care? It starts with one of the most amazing teams of heart surgeons and cardiologists that I've seen assembled under one roof and the region's leading technology in a new 40 million dollar facility. This is the nationally recognized Heart and Vascular Institute of Eastern Kentucky at Pikeville Medical Center. On Friday, March 24th, Pikeville Medical Center hosted a roundtable discussion with the president of the Kentucky Council for Post-Secondary Education Dr. Aaron Thompson. The main talking point of the meeting was to address the ongoing health care workforce crisis in eastern Kentucky. Other representatives from many local health care and education institutes were involved as part of a major collaborative effort. For Kentucky to have a continued thriving economy is going to have to have a highly educated, healthy workforce. To do that, you're going to have to have health care workers to provide that at all different levels. Higher education is the place 90% of those jobs require a higher education certificate of some sort. It doesn't have to be a four-year degree, but it has to be something that comes from post-secondary education. Our role then is to provide that. Our role is the generator of that healthy workforce and our role is the generator of those folks to provide that health. And to do that, it's going to take the partnerships between our private groups like Pikeville Medical Center and our public, in my case, public post-secondary institution, but also the private post-secondary institutions such as University of Pikeville. So all of those post-secondary institutions should be working closely hand in hand on the front end of building out what's needed for health care and for Kentucky. And so our role is in fact that of a heavy partnership, I would call it. Pikeville Medical Center president and CEO Donovan Blackburn also comments on the health care workforce crisis, saying worker retention is a big problem in the region. He believes if health care workers can be educated in east Kentucky, then they will be more likely to stay in east Kentucky. We've tried to think outside the box in ways that what makes economic sense, but what makes more sense is if I recruit somebody from Charleston, then they're here for two years and then they're gone. If I recruit somebody from Belfry, they're here for a lifetime and they're able to create that stability in care and we're able to do that in a way that doesn't cost them anything. We can put thousands of people to work in eastern Kentucky, but we have to get our education system to understand the need. We have over 530 new seats available in just Pikeville alone and these different school systems that will be open in April. MLTs, lab tech, pharmacy tech, paramedics. All these areas of shortages, we now have our school systems partnering with us while we're offering financial incentives for them, for our students, traditional or non-traditional, to go into this profession. This changes the scope and not only health care for the region, but this allows our best and our brightest to stay in our own community and to serve the patients that they grew up with, that they know by name, and that where they can make a difference. For morning from Mountain Top News, I'm Nick Collum.