Good Samaritan Hospital Awarded Training Grant from KCDC

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Good Samaritan Hospital Awarded Training Grant from KCDC

The Knox County Development Corporation has awarded Good Samaritan Hospital with a $25,000 Incumbent Worker Training grant. The grant was presented at Friday's KCDC board meeting. Good Samaritan Hospital is the first ever recipient of this award and will use the $25,000 to assist with covering the costs associated with providing its employees with Lean Six Sigma training. Lean Six Sigma is designed to improve organizational processes, decrease errors, reduce costs and promote a better workforce. It is the goal of Good Samaritan Hospital to have all of its 1,737 employees as certified Yellow Belts, 30 as Green Belts, two as Black Belts, and one Master Black Belt.

"At Good Samaritan Hospital, we believe in not only providing the highest quality of care possible for our patients, but for our employees as well. It is the mission of Good Samaritan to provide excellent health care and promote healing through trusting relationships. We are so appreciative of KCDC's recognition of not only the importance of our efforts to educate our workforce but also to achieve our mission through the creation of collaborative and trusting relationships with organizations such as Vincennes University to educate our workforce," said Rob McLin, President and CEO of Good Samaritan Hospital. "Thanks to this support and a matching amount of $640,857 on behalf of Good Samaritan Hospital, these 1,737 employees will have the opportunity to become more educated and qualified members of the workforce."

The Knox County Development Corporation has set aside $100,000 to award to area businesses as matching funds for grant money that can be used to provide additional skills training to local workers. The amount of match money that must be put up by a business is determined by a sliding scale that varies with the number of employees a company has. A company with up to 10 employees only needs to put up to 10 percent; a company with 51-100 workers must put 75 percent. Beyond that size, companies must put up a dollar for dollar match. Matching funds can also be either cash or in-kind contributions and used to support expenses such as training space fees, material costs, or the employee salary costs accrued while having them away at training. Organizations must support one of the following core objectives to apply for a KCDC grant: Increase the personal income for Knox County workers, promote small business growth, foster job retention and expansion, and close skill gaps identified through WorkKeys. Only employees working within Knox County are eligible and each trainee must be a full-time employee to the applicant organization.

"This evolved as working through the Knox County partnership of employers, high schools, Vincennes University, WorkOne, and KCDC," said Gary Gentry, President of KCDC. "KCDC felt as though the federal and state funding for such programs was slowly dwindling due to the economic situation. In order to alleviate this issue, we have created a program whose main goal is to aid in the training of incumbent workers and whose four benchmarks are to raise the income level of local workers, facilitate growth and expansion of local businesses, retain existing businesses, and close skills gaps."

"We are very excited to support Good Samaritan Hospital in their effort in training high quality employees,"said Kent Utt, Vice-Chairman of the KCDC Board of Directors. "Along with the hospital's expansion project, these highly trained employees will be a driving force to GSH becoming a regional center of excellence. This is a perfect match to our overall mission and it is an honor to be a part of this journey."

Any business that operates within the county is eligible for the program with special preference being given to companies that choose Vincennes University as the provider of training. If interested in applying for a Knox County Development Corporation Incumbent Worker Training grant, call KCDC at (812) 886-6993 or email them at info@kcdc.com.