Nursing and residential care employment has shrunk by 12% since January 2020.
Keep scrolling. Using data about employment in the healthcare industry, we will show what has happenened since early 2020.
With no sign of the "Great Reshuffle" abating or of labor shortages being mitigated, where does the Healthcare industry go from here?
The healthcare industry is counting on a few measures to attract labor: handsome pay and seeking freelance "traveling" nurses. For example, the New York Times reports:
"In New York, travelers could make $10,000 or more. The average salary of a staff nurse in Texas is about $75,000; a traveler could make that in months."
Despite momentary high earnings for some travelling nurses, the future is not bright because this freelance model is unsustainable—it places additional burdens on nursing staff and does not fix the underlying labor shortage in the industry.
With the next pandemic invariably on the horizon, only time will tell if the lessons COVID-19 is offering stakeholders were learnt to produce a more sustainable healthcare workforce–or ignored. The stakes are high: not just for healthcare workers but also because they save lives as a natural outcome of their work.