Researchers project that the U.S. healthcare industry will likely be short 2.1 million nurses by 2025. Including them in reimbursement models may be probably the most effective approach to address nurses’ mass exodus from the career, in response to Rebecca Love, who’s a nurse and the chief clinical officer of tech-enabled nurse staffing platform IntelyCare.
She shared this concept Sunday during a panel at HLTH in Las Vegas. Interestingly, moderator Bonnie Clipper, a nurse and managing partner of Innovation Advantage, identified that the session was the conference’s first ever panel focused on hearing nurse voices.
Love provided some key statistics which might be needed to grasp the true state of the nursing shortage crisis.
The primary fact to think about is that there are five million nurses within the U.S. when licensed practical nurses and registered nurses are accounted for, in response to Love. She said meaning nurses will not be only the most important workforce in healthcare, but additionally high amongst the most important workforces within the country.
Love also drew attention to the indisputable fact that most of the country’s nurses are approaching retirement age, saying that half of American nurses are older than 52.
The U.S. needs a large influx of young nurses to fill the gap that may soon be inevitably left by older ones, but the present situation for recently graduated nurses isn’t very rosy. The U.S. graduates 175,000 nursing students per 12 months, but lots of them find yourself quickly abandoning the career, in response to Love.
Before the pandemic, about half of recent nursing graduates left the bedside inside two years of practice, Love said. Whenever you take a look at recent graduates which have left the career since May 2021, she said that number has shot as much as 70%.
“There has actually never been more nurses before in america than there are today,” Love explained. “Today there are more nurses in america than ever before in history — 1.5 more million today than we even had 10 years ago. We wouldn’t have a shortage of nurses. Now we have a shortage of nurses willing to work within the healthcare environments as they’re staffed.”
Healthcare employees are leaving the industry across a wide range of professions, however the nurse situation is especially dire. A giant reason so many nurses are exiting healthcare is that despite their care being an indispensable a part of all hospital care delivery, they’re “economically non-reimbursable,” Love argued.
She called out the fact that nurses are “a value to health care systems.” In Love’s view, we should always be asking more questions on why nurses haven’t any reimbursement model — because that’s definitely not the case for other healthcare professionals who provide care.
“Until we fix the reimbursement model, we are going to simply have a career that may stop to practice in healthcare because it is today,” Love declared.
Photo: gpointstudio, Getty Images
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