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The Healthcare Provider Shortage: A Crisis Deepening Post-COVID
My ShiftRx team and I compiled tons of industry insights around the U.S. healthcare provider shortage and created a pretty comprehensive report of the landscape to let the data tell us what's happened from 2023-2025 post-COVID, and what's in store for the future.
I wanted to share some key insights here but, if you're interested in the full report—just drop a comment w/ your email and we'll send it your way!
Burnout and Turnover Reaching Crisis Levels
The pandemic pushed healthcare worker burnout and turnover to unprecedented heights:
- Physician burnout climbed from 44% in 2019 to a record 62.8% in 2021
- Nursing turnover jumped from 17-18% pre-pandemic to 27% at its peak in 2021, settling at 22.5% in 2022 (still 5 percentage points above pre-pandemic levels)
- Pharmacy staff reported the highest burnout rate of any healthcare profession at 62% in 2023, nearly double pre-pandemic levels
Financial Impact: The Costly Revolving Door
The revolving door of healthcare workers is incredibly costly:
- The average cost of replacing one bedside RN is now $52,000-$56,000, up 13% from 2021
- During COVID surges, hospitals spent 49% more on labor per patient than pre-pandemic
- Travel nurses made up 23% of nurse hours by early 2022 (vs. 4% in 2019) and consumed nearly 40% of total nurse labor costs
Extended Hiring Timelines
Filling vacant positions now takes longer than ever:
- Family medicine physician vacancies take about 4.3 months to fill, while specialist roles require 5-10 months
- Some specialized hospital roles can take up to 250 days (8+ months) to fill
Education Pipeline Constraints
Despite increased interest in healthcare careers, education pathways are bottlenecked:
- Nursing programs turned away 65,000+ qualified applicants in 2022-2023 due to faculty and resource constraints
- Pharmacy school enrollment has declined by nearly 23% from 2020 to 2023, raising concerns about future workforce availability
Patient Outcomes Suffering
The provider shortage directly impacts quality of care:
- Each additional patient added to a nurse's workload increases the odds of a patient dying in hospital by 7%
- 34% of physicians worldwide reported more medical errors due to staffing shortages
- 72% of physicians in a 2022 survey said their patients experienced delays in treatments or procedures because of staffing gaps, with over half believing these delays led to worse outcomes
Why You Should Care
The U.S. healthcare provider shortage requires immediate and sustained attention through coordinated efforts across education, policy, and workplace reform.
Providers are stretched thin with patients potentially receiving compromised care. Addressing this crisis is not just an economic imperative, but a moral one that affects the health and wellbeing of every American.