According to a 2009 report from the Pew Center on the States, a division of The Pew Charitable Trusts, more than 7 million people are in jail or prison, or on probation or parole. With one in every 31 adults under some form of correctional control, the economic costs and burdens associated with this statistic are no doubt overwhelming. Compounding this issue is the fact that too often successful prisoner reentry—the process of leaving prison and returning to society—isn’t solely correlated to a specific release date.

When the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) announced major changes in their upcoming slate of well-known nursing education programs for Fiscal Year 2012, many people started to panic . One change in particular, inter-professional education, which is being emphasized across all of their programs, has received mixed reviews. While the academic jury is still out on the effectiveness of inter-professional education methodologies compared to traditional nursing programs, HRSA has went all-in on supporting such models. For instance, the Nurse Education, Practice, Quality and Retention Program (NEPQR) will fund three-year demonstration projects in inter-professional education in the context of advancing the diverse priorities applicants are able to target historically under the program. In the past, HRSA funding under this program was limited to educating nursing personnel exclusively.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the nation’s current unemployment rate sits at an uninspiring 9%. And with today’s economy ripe for continued hard times, this issue is often alarmingly compounded by an associated lack of domestic skilled workers available to fill necessary positions.

Of the two bills signed into law that enacted the historic health care reform effort under President Obama, the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 features one of the least cited yet critically important grant opportunities since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).