The stresses of the pandemic are considered likely to cause more doctors, nurses and other health professionals to retire early or seek to move away from clinical care in hospitals and medical offices. This will worsen what many experts saw as troubling shortages of medical staff even before COVID-19 hit. The nonprofit group ECRI put staffing shortages at the top of its list of its 2022 patient safety concerns.
The challenges of sustaining the U.S. health care workforce were known before the pandemic took hold. In February 2020, for example, researchers predicted that the United States could have a shortage of 139,160 physicians within a decade.
Writing in the Atlantic in November 2021, Ed Yong recapped some of the pandemic experiences that led people to leave medicine, including belligerent acts by people skeptical of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the vaccines that work against it. “Even after they’re hospitalized, some resist basic medical procedures like proning or oxygenation, thinking themselves to be fighters, only to become delirious, anxious, and impulsive when their lungs struggle for oxygen,” Young wrote, and then quoted a nurse thinking of leaving the profession. “Once, Americans clapped for health-care heroes; now “we’re at war with a virus and its hosts are at war with us.”
As of the week ending March 20, 2022, 28 percent of U.S. nursing facilities reported at least one staffing shortage, or approximately 3,900 out of 14,000 facilities, according to a brief from the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation. There was a flurry of news coverage about salaries paid to nurses willing to travel and take temporary assignments during the pandemic. But there’s a need to dig deeper into the decisions made by hospital administrators that have left many nurses willing to leave long-term employment, and in some cases, the field of medicine, argued journalist Sarah DiGregorio in a March article in the Washington Post.
“Many hospitals have kept “their nursing staff as lean as possible, treating the nursing workforce like a tap they can turn on and off to maximize profits,” DiGregori wrote. “Ping-ponging from furloughs and layoffs to cutting hours and then to mandatory overtime is not a recipe for retention. The understaffing crisis is a circular problem: Not hiring enough nurses makes working conditions unbearable, leading to more nurses leaving their jobs.”