Healthcare Struggles to Meet Healthcare Needs
Our healthcare industry is sick and broken. Nurses are retiring and exiting the professional at in record numbers. According to the American Nursing Association
“By 2022, there will be far more registered nurse jobs available than any other profession, at more than 100,000 per year. With more than 500,000 seasoned RNs anticipated to retire by 2022, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the need for 1.1 million new RNs for expansion and replacement of retirees, and to avoid a nursing shortage.
Over the past decade, the average age of employed RNs has increased by nearly two years, from 42.7 years in 2000 to 44.6 years in 2010. These factors, combined with an anticipated strengthening of the economy, will create a renewed critical shortage for nurses.”
Cost, Quality, and Access
Healthcare has supply chain problems like all other industries. Every shortage has a ripple affect impacting other aspects of normal life. While the healthcare staffing crisis may not feel important to you today, the reality of rationing care is an ever-present danger in every community.
- Increased cost of care. The pandemic is shifting our care delivery system. High demand professionals, like nurses, are fetching higher wages. In fact, the growing allure of travel nursing is lucrative but most often means working in the most demanding roles in the hospitals. Rising cost of staff and supplies means hospital systems charge more or make painful cuts to compensate for the imbalance.
- Quality of care issues. No doubt, staff shortages impact quality of care. Senior staff are retiring in record numbers. Younger staff pick up the slack, but the lack of experience is increasing errors. In some sectors, caregivers are leaving due to burnout and workplace issues.
- Access to care is reduced. If increasing cost and reduce quality is not enough, access is diminishing. Emergency departments are struggling, and ambulances sit idle waiting to unload their arrivals and respond to the next emergency call. The rapid growth of Hospital at Home mobile treatment units is one bright spot for building access to care. However, these services rarely cover the inner city and rural areas where access was an issue before the pandemic began.
Urgent Need to Build Our Forces
The Centers for Medicare and Medicare are rolling out new models of care to right the ship for us. However, demonstration models require time and money that is in short supply. We need an all-hands-on deck call to action from all corners of government and healthcare.
- Engage every nursing and allied profession school in the national emergency plan. These academic centers contain some of the brightest and most seasoned caregivers. Give them the financing to recruit, train and retain the workforce we need. Reward students entering these professions with scholarships and other incentives.
- Expand the use of telehealth and other technologies to bridge the staffing gap. This can only happen if every citizen has access to broadband. The pandemic CARES Act and American Rescue Plan funds for installing internet in rural and inner-city areas are essential. We need our healthcare system to be a service and not a destination by maximizing entry points and minimizing the barriers to care through telehealth and other smart health technologies.
- Simultaneously, we need national public health campaigns to engage all citizens in our national health improvement. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Imagine if each new care professional embraced their role as vital to our national security as if they joined the armed forces. Our nation is strong when our people are healthy.
Welcome to Credit for Caring 2.0
