SCOTT BROCATO:
What are some of the reasons for the current (health care workforce) shortage?
TERESA KELLER:
Well, healthcare professional shortages have always been a problem. There's always more people wanting services than there are healthcare providers. The nursing shortage, in fact, was first really identified in the 60s and it has been ongoing since then—except, for a short time, in the 90s. So we constantly deal with nursing shortages. And there are some factors you can consider that are making it worse right now. The US population growth in the last few years makes a chronic shortage worse. In other words, we added, I think, 30 million people to the population, 300 (million). So the growth of the US. population just means there's more people that need primary care or surgical services or vaccinations or whatever. The aging of the US population, you know, we have this big wave of baby boomers that are now going through retiring and entering their older years where they need more services. You know, we need more medicines, we need more specialists, and that's going to keep going until the boomers have shuffled off this mortal coil.
There's also—this goes along with the boomers—the aging of the healthcare workforce. The average age of nurses is about 50 in this country. About 80% of dentists are older than 45 and about 60% of the physician workforce is over the age of 45. And to shift the focus a little bit because, you know, the healthcare workforce contains many different kinds of professionals. So the growth in jobs for physical therapists are expected to grow by 21% in the next few years. And I think the average occupational growth rate is 8%. So we'll see shortages get worse for physical therapists also.
SCOTT BROCATO:
Well, what kind of numbers are we looking at approximately, regarding how many nurses and other healthcare professionals have left the workplace due to stress caused by the pandemic? You're saying this (the work shortage) has gone back to the 60s, well before the pandemic; since the pandemic, approximately how many have left the profession because of (the pandemic)?
TERESA KELLER:
Some of this is hard to tease out because people...some of these factors, like the aging workforce, people are retiring or they would have retired anyway.
SCOTT BROCATO:
So not just because COVID specifically.
TERESA KELLER:
Right, right. So one in five physicians survey indicated they would leave the workforce in the next five years and they were burned out from stress by COVID. So there's one little factoid. The really interesting COVID effect on nursing numbers was the jump in the number of travel nurse positions. These hospitals were desperate to get enough staffing in to deal with the epidemic of people with COVID. So the income from these short term assignments can be as much as two or three times what a nurse usually makes. So many nurses with their job took a travel job. Some of them, their position, their travel position, was in their own hometown with their former employer. Now the cost to the healthcare system of all of these travel expenses for nurses that you needed to bring in for the workforce? The cost of that was humongous for these hospitals. They’re still dealing with the costs of these because, obviously, the higher salaries for the nurses translates into a higher profit margin for these companies, and there has been some discussion in the public health literature about price gouging. But I'll leave that to another set of professionals.
SCOTT BROCATO:
About how many workers, health care workers, were estimated to have died as a result of COVID-19? Worldwide, U.S.--do you happen to have those figures?
TERESA KELLER:
Yeah, I do. The World Health Organization estimates that there were about 115,500 healthcare worker deaths worldwide. In the US, the CDC estimates that here were 440,000-plus healthcare worker cases. But there were about 1,469 deaths among those cases, about a third of these deaths occurred in the initial months of the COVID surge. So if you remember, back then it was a new phenomenon. People didn't know how to treat these people. They weren't sure what was going on with them. There were unknown treatments. The disease had unknown causes and there was simply not enough protective equipment across this country and all the hospitals to protect all healthcare workers. So actually, the death of health care workers went down after that, once we began to learn how to take care of people under those conditions.
SCOTT BROCATO:
With all of the factors that you just mentioned, how can these current healthcare workforce shortages be addressed?
TERESA KELLER:
Well, in nursing, it's estimated that nursing schools across the country would turn away about 80,000 potential students, just simply because you don't have enough faculty and you do not have enough classrooms and clinical sites for all the people who were enrolled in nursing programs. And it's the same thing with physicians. There's certainly limits in medical schools for how many students they can bring in, and physician residency positions across the country or government-financed usually. So if you can finance more residency positions, you can have more residents and more positions. Otherwise you can address it with more liberal immigration. Bring in nurses from Canada, nurses from the Philippines, positions from Canada, from Mexico, from Europe. All of that is limited by our immigration policies.
And the other thing is, you know, another big limiting factor on educating students across all the professions, is the salaries for educators. Many physician and nurse educators make a whole lot more money out in the market than they do as educators. So in some cases, you cannot afford to go teach in a nursing school, or you can only do it part-time because you just simply have to support a family.
SCOTT BROCATO:
Professor Teresa Kelly, professor of nursing at NMSU. Thank you for joining us today on KRWG Public Media to talk about this.
TERESA KELLER:
Well, thank you.
