Literacy crisis threatens hospital workforce

If the nursing shortage was the human resource crisis of the 1980s, then the shortage of hospital employees in such areas as housekeeping, security, and data processing promises to be the hospital workforce crisis of the 1990s. In response to troubling demographic trends, some forward-looking hospitals are now in the process of "growing their own" employees by teaching basic literacy skills and exposing neighborhood youths to the hospital work ethic.