Many nurses and physicians are among the baby boomers who will start to retire in the next
three to five years. The federal government is predicting that by 2020, nurse and physician
retirements will contribute to a shortage of approximately 24,000 doctors and nearly 1 million
nurses. While hospital leaders voice much of the concern over possible shortages, the
implications extend throughout the labor-intensive, trillion-dollar United States health system.
It’s expensive to educate new nurses and doctors. Taxpayer-funded Medicare spends $8 billion
a year for residence training of physicians alone.
While the US has more physicians and nurses today than ever before, they are not distributed
or deployed efficiently. Shortage projections tend to be built around today’s often dysfunctional
system, which makes them problematic. However, while future shortages are certainly
worrisome, the bigger issue for health industry leaders today lies in orchestrating care in
an increasingly complex and converging healthcare labor market.
Shortages, or even talk of shortages, can manipulate markets, creating problems for health
industry executives who face the daily issues of recruiting and retaining the best talent.
Yet because shortages have also been cyclical, short-term solutions have won out over
long-term changes.
Seeking solutions means understanding that while the challenges confronting nurse and
physician shortages are very different, their roles and futures are starting to converge.
Healthcare is a team sport: a dozen or more types of physicians and nurses can be involved in
a single patient’s care, and the need for coordination and planning becomes more imperative
and complex. It’s not a matter of determining the mix of nurses and doctors to deliver efficient
and effective care. Executives today must consider what kinds of nurses and doctors are
needed, what tasks these clinicians are best educated to deliver, and how technology and
lower-skilled workers can be used to supplement or replace them.
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