Hospitals largely left out as nursing workforce fully recovers from COVID

At its height, the COVID-19 pandemic displaced more than 10,000 RNs from their jobs. Three years later, the workforce is back and growing strong, according to a study published Feb. 16 in JAMA Health Forum.

In fact, the authors remark, future staffing challenges involving nurses probably won’t include an “overall shortage,” as sometimes seemed a given during the pandemic, and competition for RNs across healthcare sectors “will likely remain robust.”

However, nurses are increasingly choosing to work in non-hospital settings.

David Auerbach, PhD, of Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., and colleagues made the findings and conclusions upon analyzing RN employment data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

To contextualize trends leading up to the pandemic, they used historic data dating from 1982 through 2023.

To project forthcoming RN employment levels, they conducted a retrospective cohort analysis, grouping nurses by age distribution and likely employment status through 2035.

The researchers’ final study sample comprised more than 455,000 RNs between the ages of 23 and 69.

They found that, following the drastic decline of 2021, RN employment recovered: The total number of FTE RNs in 2022 and 2023 was 6% higher than in 2019 (3.35 million vs 3.16 million, respectively).

Further, using data on employment, education and population through 2022, they projected the size of the RN workforce will grow by around 1.2 million FTEs to 4.56 million by 2035.

Auerbach and co-authors point out those figures would put the employed RN population back to what had been forecast for the workforce prior to the pandemic.

They anticipate the employment growth to be driven mainly by RNs aged 35 to 49 years, and they project this demographic to make up almost half the RN workforce in 2035—47%—up from 38% in 2022.

“We expect continued robust growth in the U.S. RN workforce, largely due to the strong and sustained growth of RNs who are now in their late 20s and 30s,” Auerbach and colleagues comment in their discussion.

Meanwhile, however, RN employment “shifted away from hospitals during the pandemic,” the researchers report, showing the percentage of RNs employed in hospitals dropped from 60.3% before the pandemic to 57.8% after the pandemic as the number of hospital RNs grew only 1.6%.

The anywhere-but-hospitals trend “was entirely due to a drop in hospital employment among RNs older than 40 years,” Auerbach et al. write. “While this shift was happening before the pandemic, it has accelerated.”

More:

Whether the [overall] forecasted growth [of nurses] will satisfy needs for the types of healthcare services provided by RNs, or match healthcare delivery organizations’ demand for RN labor, remains to be seen. These uncertainties suggest a heightened need to continue to monitor changes in the U.S. RN workforce.

Full study here.