Recent news articles have spilled much ink about the current nurse shortage. According to Pew, due to nursing shortages “Hospitals nationwide are canceling nonemergency surgeries, can not quickly find beds for patients and neglecting to meet the minimum nurse-patient ratios it's advocated.” Nursing wages are rising too. The Baltimore Sun reports that the University of Maryland Medical System is likely to spend $5.1 million to recruit nurses. However, they are anecdotal accounts. What do the information say at the national level?
A paper by Buerhaus et al. (2022) uses aggregate payroll data in the Bureau of Labor Statistics and unemployment data in the Current Population Survey (CPS). The information cover the time from February 2022 (right before the pandemic) to June 2022.
Based on the data, the authors look for a decline in healthcare employment that is “unprecedented”.
By April 2022 employment had decreased most in physician offices (-11 percent), outpatient care centers (-8 percent), and residential health care (-7 percent). Employment decreased least in hospitals (-2 percent), the biggest employer of RNs, partly due to an influx of patients with COVID-19 along with other patients whose care could not be delayed. Nursing facilities saw merely a small decline by April 2022 (-3 percent), but unlike other sectors, the decline in nursing facilities continued into 2022. Employment in many sectors gradually returned toward prepandemic levels over the course of 2022, except in the nursing home sector, where the decline continued steadily. Employment levels had rebounded in hospitals (-2.2 percent), physician offices (-0.7 percent), and outpatient centers (+2.6 %) by June 2022. However, fifteen months in to the pandemic, total employment in nursing homes remained 13.2 percent less than it had been in February 2022
While post-pandemic employment decreased only 1% for registered nurses in accordance with a pre-pandemic baseline, these figures were a 10% for licensed practical or vocational nurses (LPN/LVN) along with a 20% decline for nursing assistants (NAs). As a reason for context, as health care employment hasn't decreased any year during the previous 3 decades.
Nurse wages also have risen dramatically, designed for /LVN and NAs. For hospital-based LPN/LVN and NAs, wage growth was a lot more than 10% last year.
