Skip to main content

South Carolina AHEC Welcomes Katie Gaul as New Office for Healthcare Workforce Director and Recognizes Linda Lacey's 10 Years of Service to the State

Katie Gaul
The South Carolina AHEC Program welcomes Katie Gaul as the new director of the South Carolina Office for Healthcare Workforce and bids a fond farewell to Linda Lacey, who will be retiring at the end of the year. 

Linda joined South Carolina AHEC in 2009 as the founding director of the South Carolina Office for Healthcare Workforce (SCOHW), which received startup funding from The Duke Endowment. SCOHW works closely with other state agencies and health-related organizations to ensure they have the information they need about the healthcare workforce in South Carolina and the issues affecting the future of that workforce. During her tenure, Linda established the South Carolina Health Professions Data Book – a widely used resource that describes the available healthcare workforce, population, health status and social/economic conditions in each county in the state. Updated every two years, the data book was recognized as a ‘best state document’ in 2013 by the South Carolina State Library. Under Linda’s vision and leadership, SCOHW has published more than 50 reports and fact sheets and fulfilled hundreds of data requests. Linda’s extensive experience as a healthcare workforce researcher and policy expert has been instrumental in creating a valuable resource for state policy makers, educational programs, health systems, and others in need of timely and accurate information about the healthcare workforce in South Carolina. 
Linda Lacey

Katie brings with her a deep commitment to service, a well-grounded understanding of state health workforce data systems and experience in providing data to inform policy. She worked for many years as a research associate in the Program on Health Workforce Research and Policy and the Rural Health Research Program at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; as the deputy director of the HRSA-funded Health Workforce Technical Assistance Center; and, most recently, as a senior policy analyst with the Health Division in the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices. Her expertise is built from assisting in the development of state health workforce data systems in multiple states; supporting state and national projects related to health workforce education, practice, and policy; and connecting researchers, policy makers, and others to timely and objective health workforce data and information.

 Please join us in thanking Linda for her service and welcoming Katie to our state, our communities and our South Carolina AHEC System.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Marchek Siblings Stay Connected With Upstate AHEC Through Academic Journey

 A pair of siblings from Greer are giving back to current Upstate AHEC Health Careers students after completing the program themselves. Alex Marchek, MD is in his first year as a family medicine resident at Prisma Health Seneca. His younger sister by two years, Anna Marchek, is a second-year medical student at Edward Via College of Medicine (VCOM) Carolinas. “My mom likes to say she did good,” Anna joked. “Both of her kids are going to be doctors. She went two-for-two.” Anna (left) and Alex (right) Marchek are pictured with Nita Donald, Executive Director of Upstate AHEC. While Alex and Anna have both chosen to pursue medicine as a career, their interest in healthcare developed differently. Alex describes his discovery of health sciences as a slow realization. “It was definitely something that was on my radar really young,” said Alex. “My parents will say when I was six years old, I was talking about doing something in medicine. I had some really great science teachers in elementar...
Read more

Pee Dee AHEC Clinical Placements Help Students See Challenges – and Opportunities – of Rural Primary Care

  Third-year medical student Omar Guerrero didn’t find his passion for a career in healthcare until he began shadowing health professionals as an undergraduate student. “I just knew that I really loved science and working with my hands,” said Guerrero, who double-majored in Public Health and Cellular & Molecular Biology while at the University of South Florida. It all clicked for him once he was able to observe physicians in their encounters with patients. “I saw there was a real need for Spanish-speaking physicians,” said Guerrero. “There’s a lot of disconnect between providers and Spanish-speaking patients and I thought that was definitely an area that I could make a difference in.” Now in his third year at A.T. Still University’s School of Osteopathic Medicine in Arizona, Guerrero is doing a clinical placement at Beaufort-Jasper-Hampton Comprehensive Health Services, Inc. in Richland. Guerrero was connected with Pee Dee AHEC and their Health Professions Student (HPS) program...
Read more

Simulation Training Prepares Students for Rural Primary Care

Since its inception in 2021, South Carolina AHEC’s Simulation Education Training (SET) has remained a favorite experience amongst health professions students statewide. Pee Dee AHEC Scholars and other health professions students pose for the camera during a simulation Since its inception in 2021, South Carolina AHEC’s Simulation Education Training (SET) has remained a favorite experience amongst health professions students statewide. SET uses simulation-based technology to expose students to clinical environments and scenarios that mirror what providers experience in rural, medically-underserved communities. “A lot of simulations are emergent or hospital-based and students are usually being graded as a formal assessment when they participate,” said SC AHEC Curriculum Coordinator Dawn Leberknight, who was heavily involved in the development of the initiative. “We tried to make [SET] more informal to expose students to simulations before it’s high stakes, and then to really focus on rura...
Read more