(Note: We won't be publishing this weekend in honor of Memorial Day and a once-every-30-years house move. Be back on Tuesday.)
Travel nurse services have been the target of hospitals' lobbying efforts as they have faced loss of workers who took the travel nurse 13 week winning lottery ticket. They have also grumbled about the impact on morale with high priced travel nurses working side-by-side with employed staff. We have questioned the level of significance to which the AHA and FAH have attached to these problems given the size of the travel nurse labor pool relative to the vast health care sector. In politics, though, perception is the cruelest form of reality.
As we have noted for several months, the labor situation, while still tough especially for low-wage, low skill workers, has stabilized enough for most hospital administrators to meet the needs of their communities. Labor shortages, where they persist are now so durable, adaptation is setting in. In other words, reliance on travel nurses was always a short term plan.
There are going to be regional differences and those may confuse the acceptance and adaptation mode we are in now. New York and Illinois are probably not going to see employment growth in the health care sector (which is typically about 2/3 of the Health Care and Social Assistance dataset) given their general loss of population. Florida and Texas appear to be staffing at levels just a smidge above pre-pandemic levels and are benefitting from in-migration. California is hard to read as they spend much more on social assistance then most states.
Not yet but soon, health care is going to have to do what manufacturing did in the 1990s - adapt and end its hyper-dependence on labor. It will probably start where supply for labor will no longer meet demand.
Emily Evans
Managing Director – Health Policy
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