The U.S. Armed Forces provides a model for how highly skilled professionals can teach, train and mobilize a reserve force of part-timers who can mobilize in times of crisis. The military has an explicit strategy to maintain surge capacity for wartime; the National Guard and military reserve forces are ready for activation on short notice. (As it happens, there is already a Medical Reserve Corps, but it is run through the Department of Health and Human Services, and while it provides some medical swing capacity, they are volunteers and the numbers are relatively sparse.)

In addition to having a reserve corps, the military also provides an example of how one can train recruits to serve and support the medical needs of the armed forces—without sending them all to nursing or medical school. After basic training, the Army can turn a recruit into a combat medic in 16 weeks or a respiratory therapist in nine months. In the MASH hospital in Vietnam where one of us served decades ago, a team of two physicians and 15 nurses leveraged a team of 100 medical corpsman to treat 20,000 wounded soldiers in the course of a year.

With this as a model, there is no reason why we cannot establish a Health Care Ready Reserve to train 1 million Americans to cope with a near-term surge in Covid-19 patients and provide capacity for future public health care emergencies. By our estimates, this investment could cost up to $50 billion for training and wages—a small sum in the context of the trillions we are spending now to weather this storm.

A health care jobs program, too.

It would also provide employment—now—to people who need it, similar to the way the WPA provided jobs during the Great Depression. At its peak in 1938, the WPA employed 3 million Americans and put them to work rebuilding the country. The WPA gave the unemployed a livelihood, not just a handout, and taught long-lasting skills that enriched the nation’s human capital long after the program wound down.

Similarly, establishing a Health Care Ready Reserve would provide jobs and training to Americans who are currently unemployed while giving them a start toward getting a permanent health sector job after the pandemic is passed. It would also provide critical manpower to expand the ability of highly trained doctors, nurses and epidemiologists to fight the Covid-19 battle.

Training this new cohort of medical professionals would take place over a period of three to 12 months, and could be conducted at U.S. military bases using the established curricula for army medics and scaled up through new digital learning applications. Recruits would be compensated for their time during the training and continue to be paid once deployed, either in their own communities or in hot spots.

If the Health Care Ready Reserve were available now, its members could help administer Covid-19 tests, follow up on contact tracing of people who’ve been exposed to the virus, provide relief to exhausted medical staff and perform vital logistical tasks such as food distribution and disinfection. Some members could be ready within weeks to assist in the vital tasks of mass testing.

When not deployed, Health Care Ready Reserve members would return to their communities. They would train on weekends—monthly or quarterly—keeping their skills current. Future deployments would depend on the nature and magnitude of the threats. Many will likely find themselves newly qualified for conventional health care jobs as our economy stabilizes.

The Health Care Ready Reserve would draw heavily from the ranks of those who have lost their jobs and may never get them back, even when the economy restarts. Restaurant and retail workers—among others—can learn basic medical skills to assist physicians and nurses while branching out into prevention and public health. As our country ages, demand for skilled health care work will increase. Mercer Consulting estimates that by 2025 we will need an additional 400,000 more home health aides and nearly 100,000 more nursing assistants than we are currently training. Participation in this reserve force could provide a steppingstone for workers to transition from shrinking parts of the economy to those, like home health care, that are growing.

The best time to establish a Health Care Ready Reserve would have been years ago, to establish itself and prepare for a pandemic. But the second-best time is right now. The U.S. military already knows how to train people quickly, and they should start immediately. We can train these reserves within weeks, and they can play a central role in combating this pandemic as it inevitably ebbs and surges around the country through the summer, fall and beyond. Along the way, we will up-skill thousands of Americans and give them the dignity of a job that is more than a paycheck, because it is also a great public service.

