Natwar Gandhi, with his fingers firmly around the throat of any politician or businessmen who would bust the city budget and tarnish D.C.’s gold-plated bond rating, has extended his reach into education. Gandhi has come up with a well-conceived remedy for a long-standing problem, and it comes with a tight budget, as one would expect of D.C.’s chief financial officer.
Gandhi and everyone else paying any attention knows the Washington region creates thousands of jobs every year; on the other hand, D.C. has one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation. We are a city of people in need of work in a sea of employers begging for workers, especially in the health care industry.
What to do?
Politicians talk a good game about developing programs to train workers, and school superintendents mouth off about starting vocational training programs. Gandhi has done something.
Gandhi knows the value of vocational training. His schooling in India as an accountant has gotten him from balancing books in Bombay to controlling the purse springs of the U.S. capital city.
Why not train health care workers? Gandhi saw a health care industry in need of workers. He saw our local college, the University of the District of Columbia, lacking programs to train workers. And he saw a nearby institution — Northern Virginia Community College — that was turning out health care workers.
Gandhi came up with $600,000 from the D.C. budget to finance a pilot program that will send UDC students to the Northern Virginia campus for health care training. They can come away with certificates that should lead directly to jobs.
Who takes credit for this collaboration, if it succeeds, is a matter of political need. Needing none, Gandhi isn’t interested in a pat on the back, but he does promise to parlay the $600,000 into millions from Congress.
UDC President William Pollard told me the health care training project came from his friendship with James Dyke, chairman of the UDC board and a successful lawyer in Northern Virginia. The two were having lunch one day with Robert Templin, president of NVCC. Oh, Gandhi was there, too.
“The question was,” Pollard says, “How can we speed up certification training for District people?”
The answer was to send UDC students to Springfield where NVCC has its Medical Education Campus.
I asked Pollard what the training will entail.
“Phlebotomy,” he said. “That’s the technical term for drawing blood.”
This is all fine and well, and anything that trains people is good by me, but I must ask, why can’t we train health care workers in D.C.? UDC has been in operation since 1975, when three teachers colleges combined. It has a fine nursing program. Can’t it train students to draw blood?
The collaboration with NVCC hopes to expand beyond phlebotomy, according to the university. It could train dental assistants, pharmacy technicians, MRI operators and more.
To be sure, Nat Gandhi will be tabulating the students trained and the jobs they get. As he knows, success is in the numbers.
Harry Jaffe has been covering the Washington area since 1985. E-mail him at [email protected].
