Progress on Addressing the Healthcare Workforce Shortage
10/3/2024
This article first appeared as a column in the 2024 October issue of South Florida Hospital News
By Mary Mayhew, FHA President and CEO
There are few issues as essential to hospitals’ missions as a healthy, resilient, and supported workforce. From the frontlines to the back office, every hospital team member contributes in a unique and indispensable way to the patient experience and to patient outcomes. Florida hospitals have some of the most advanced technologies, practices, and therapies in the world, but all would be rendered useless without the caring and skilled people who come to work in our institutions every day. While machines, beds, equipment, supplies, medications, and technology are vital to modern health care, it’s healthcare professionals and support staff – the people — who diagnose, treat, and deliver the high-quality care and compassion to patients during some of the happiest and most difficult moments of their lives that define the standard for care.
Today, the worst days of the pandemic are in the rearview, but it hasn’t been that long since the hospital workforce was almost completely upended. Turnover rates, vacancy rates, and labor costs reached new highs, forcing a wholesale reevaluation of strategies to recruit, retain, support, and grow the health care workforce.
Florida’s hospitals took on that challenge. We are turning the tide on workforce turnover and vacancies — key measures of the effectiveness of retention strategies and supply of hospital nurses and allied health professionals to meet the demand for care – but we cannot let up.
After an unprecedented high of a 21 percent vacancy rate for registered nurses in 2022, through the unceasing efforts of hospitals to support the healthcare workforce supply, establishing “earn while you learn” programs, partnering with nursing schools, providing scholarships and tuition reimbursement, the vacancy rate has been reduced by over 62 percent to 7.8 percent as of August 2024. Similarly, as hospitals evaluated all aspects of the workplace environment and revamped onboarding programs, leveraged technology to reduce administrative burdens, evaluated new approaches to staffing schedules, supported team models of care delivery, and expanded professional development opportunities, the turnover rate for registered nurses declined by over 45 percent from an unprecedented high of 32 percent in 2022 to 17.6 percent in 2024.
Hospital efforts have been further supported in Tallahassee as lawmakers both prioritized meaningful legislation to take a zero-tolerance stand against violence against our health care heroes and made significant investments to grow the workforce. Such appropriations include $380 million over several years to support critical health care workforce initiatives like Prepping Institutions, Programs, Employers and Learners through Incentives for Nursing Education (PIPELINE) and Linking Industry to Nursing Education (LINE) programs. These programs award grants to technical career centers, colleges and universities to scale up programs that teach and train nurses, support student scholarships, recruit and retain faculty, and fund equipment and simulation centers.
Today, Florida’s population continues to grow every single day – at one point nearly 1,000 individuals a day were coming to our great state. Many of these individuals are over the age of 65, which further contributes to the increasing need for healthcare in the Sunshine state. As the third-largest state in the country, we must lead with worldclass care close to home. Building on our healthcare workforce efforts is critical to maintaining progress and ensuring Florida has the workforce it needs today and into the future to continue delivering timely, superior patient care for all. The projected shortage of nurses in Florida by 2035 is 59,100, in large part because the supply is not keeping up with population and demographic trends. In addition, we need to expand state educational funding to support other critical allied health and behavioral health professions.
Florida is a world-class destination for students, families, retirees, and visitors. And, it is consistently ranked among the best states to live. Those are the reasons for the state’s strong economy, but it creates strain on the health care system particularly when the time required for education and training of health care professionals is lengthy.
Floridians expect and deserve the best health care. To deliver on this expectation today, tomorrow, and well into the future, we must continue to tackle the health care workforce shortage of physicians, nurses, and allied health professionals to support our vision of worldclass care close to home.