News: Healthcare employment back to pre-pandemic levels but nurse shortage continues, report says

With 44,200 healthcare jobs added in February, healthcare employment now matches pre-pandemic levels according to a recent report from Altarum, a nonprofit, healthcare-focused research and consulting organization. The workforce currently stands at 1.3% more jobs than in February 2020 based on the organization’s monthly report, which has shown in the past a average trend of 49,100 added jobs per month for the past year. Wage growth, on the other hand, continues to decline as it has since mid-2022 and has fallen behind economywide growth at 4.2%, Becker’s Hospital Review reported.

Researchers used available data to analyze healthcare spending, prices, employment, and utilization in the report. Of the 44,200 new jobs last month, 19,400 of them were added by hospitals, 13,700 by nursing and residential care facilities, and 11,100 by ambulatory care settings.

Despite healthcare employment being just about where it was pre-pandemic, what that actually looks like varies by setting. Hospital employment matches levels from three years ago best, 0.8% higher than in 2020 with 42,000 jobs. Ambulatory care employment, on the other hand, has grown 5.6% higher with nearly 440,000 jobs. Nursing and residential care employment show the opposite trend, below 2020 levels by more than 270,000 jobs.

With recent news that hospital CEOs rank healthcare staffing as their top concern, the increase in healthcare jobs is a hopeful sign—but shortages particularly in nursing continue to be felt. Many nurses reported unsafe staffing levels just in the last month, according to Becker’s Hospital Review, and sectors such as nursing homes continue to face crisis-level shortages. The overall number of healthcare jobs shows some improvement in the industry’s perpetual staffing shortage concerns, but the data findings suggest further progress is needed in certain healthcare sectors for true relief to be felt.

Editor’s note: To read Becker’s Hospital Review’s coverage of this story, click here. To read the full Altarum report, click here.