Almost half of U.S. nurses are at least “somewhat likely” to leave their professions in the upcoming two years, according to a new report from ShiftMed.
Of those workers, 38% plan to pursue non-patient facing roles in health care, while 31% plan on leaving health care altogether.
“I would say this number was shocking,” Todd Walrath, the CEO of ShiftMed, told Home Health Care News. “We already know there’s a nursing shortage, and we know that there’s people leaving the workforce for a variety of reasons. But I don’t think that number is factored into anybody’s calculus right now, the speed at which they may leave it in the future. It might be an indication that the impact of COVID – and kind of the current state of work for these front-line workers – is building up.”
ShiftMed is a mobile nursing platform with over 60,000 nurses in its network, some of which are home-based care workers specifically. Its annual report – released in tandem with Wakefield Research – included survey results from 250 U.S. nurses, including 200 RNs, 25 LPNs and 25 CNAs.
Even if most of these workers are facility-based, gaps in one part of the health care system are likely to affect all sorts of sectors.
The biggest reasons why workers may not consider a career in nursing at this point are mostly because of safety concerns, treatment of workers and the fear of burnout, according to the report.
“I’m not trying to be too dramatic here,” Walrath said. “But I think that if you’re a health care provider – whether you’re private-duty home care, home health or in a hospital setting – you need to operate a little bit more like you’re in survival mode.”
Over 75% of surveyed nurses said they believed that the desire to take care of others was no longer enough to attract more people to the profession, according to the report.
“Getting credentialed workers and having them available for work is already every health care provider’s No. 1 problem,” Walrath said.
While the workers’ desires are relatively simple, home-based care providers may have to get innovative in order to address them.
When asked what would keep them from leaving the field, 59% of nurses said higher pay, 30% said better shifts and 30% said a more flexible schedule.
At the very least, for the latter two, Walrath believes technology can be the panacea to those problems, as could the “power of choice” for workers.
“You might need to look at the technology you’re using to satisfy your workers,” he said. “Because through technology, they can now have power through choice. They can pick the shifts they want, they can have impact on their commutes, they can have impact on their schedules, they can work across providers. For the first time, they can [feasibly] work at a hospital system, clinic or home care agency.”
In regards to vaccine mandates – another part of the survey – nurses were relatively split. For instance, 23% said that vaccine mandates would actually be more likely to convince them to stay, while 19% said they would convince them to leave.
Companies featured in this article:
