The healthcare workforce will become the nation’s largest employment sector in the next decade, surpassing all other industries in job growth and representing one in four new jobs by 2024, according to recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The year 2016, however, is when healthcare providers will need to come to terms with the growing workforce challenge – how will they recruit and manage the healthcare professionals they need in an era of rising patient demand and increasing clinician shortages that plague the industry?
Healthcare workforce experts recently gathered in Nashville to search for answers to the challenge. The 2015 Healthcare Workforce Summit was a collaborative, innovation-focused forum of the most influential leaders in the healthcare workforce industry – including C-suite executives; leaders from human resources and finance; and nursing, physicians and allied leadership.
Susan Salka, president and CEO of AMN Healthcare, the leading sponsor of the Healthcare Workforce Summit, explained to the audience that healthcare added nearly a half million jobs from November 2014 to November 2015, an unprecedented era of growth. She added this high-demand environment for healthcare professionals is expected to continue. Since workforce supply cannot keep up with demand, she noted, “business as usual just won’t work.”
Instead, Salka said new and innovative solutions must be developed. The two days of panel discussions, presentations and networking included:
- Release of the AMN “2015 Survey of Registered Nurses,” which revealed for the first time that the surge in nurse retirements might be about to happen. The survey of nearly 9,000 nurses showed that about two-thirds of Baby Boomer nurses are considering retirement now that the recession is over. Of those experienced nurses considering retirement, 62 percent said they would retire within the next three years.
- A presentation on workforce supply and demand showed healthcare employment grew in unprecedented numbers – nearly a 500,000 jobs in the last year. However, job openings are growing at an even faster pace than job hires, creating a widening gap of unfilled healthcare jobs. Demand for quality healthcare professionals is growing due to the increase of people with health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, the aging of the U.S. population, and other forces at work.
- The need for workforce planning to become a strategic initiative throughout the industry is underscored by the fact that labor is the largest budget item for nearly any healthcare enterprise, comprising more than half of operating expenses. Technology-enabled strategic planning services are now available in healthcare to accurately predict patient demand and workforce needs up to three months in advance and to apply advanced labor management techniques to meet those staffing needs.
- Since Millennials will comprise half of the workforce in 2020 and three-quarters of it by 2030, healthcare providers need to analyze current generational demographics and their impact on workforce planning. Millennials, who are used to working in teams, might be well suited to new care delivery and payer models. Millennials have proven they can acclimate to new team-based healthcare approaches, and their affinity for integrated technology could be particularly well suited to the strong IT component of accountable care.
The need to focus more attention on workforce challenges facing healthcare became even more evident with the December release of new employment projections by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Total job openings for healthcare will exceed 5 million from 2014-2024. For registered nurses alone, there will be nearly 1.1 million jobs that need to be filled.
In concluding the healthcare workforce summit, Salka said healthcare providers would increasingly find they couldn’t go it alone as workforce challenges become too great. Partnerships between providers and workforce experts will become essential to the healthcare industry, she concluded.
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2015 Healthcare Workforce Summit