Health care workforce turnover increased after pandemic

According to , healthcare worker turnover increased after the pandemic.tudy published online on January 26th JAMA Health Forum.

Karen Shen, Ph.D., of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, and colleagues used U.S. Census Bureau state unemployment benefits to help people retire from the health care workforce before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. quantified the number of workers entering the industry. data.

The researchers found that approximately 18.8 million people worked in the healthcare field in this sample in the first quarter of 2020. At the start of the pandemic, healthcare worker turnover was increasing from the baseline quarterly average. In the first quarters of 2018 and 2020, it was 5.9 percentage points to 8.0 percentage points, respectively. Through the fourth quarter of 2021, attrition rates remained higher than baseline levels, with healthcare provider attrition rates 7.7 percentage points higher than his 2018 baseline.

The increase in healthcare worker turnover was primarily driven by the increase in workers who became unemployed and left the workforce in the first quarter of 2020 (78% increase compared to baseline). In contrast, the attrition rate was dominated by workers leaving for jobs in the non-health sector by the fourth quarter of 2021 (up 38%). An increase in entry rates into healthcare was observed in the post-pandemic period, suggesting an increase in turnover of healthcare staff.

“Given these findings, policy efforts to address health worker burnout and improve the health worker employment pipeline are well justified,” the authors write.