Research & Insights

The workforce crisis

Today’s clinical workforce is unsustainable. Without major changes to care delivery, traditional challenges like burnout and turnover — especially among early career staff — will diminish quality of care. While status quo solutions and quick fixes are not enough, find out how we can leverage technology to address many of the root causes of the workforce crisis.


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Tackle these challenges
Nursing turnover, vacancy, and premium labor use are at all-time highs. 

Physicians are burned out, so employers must strive to win physician talent.

  • Young nurses today have more employment opportunities than ever and face little to no penalty for changing jobs. To retain new, young employees, leaders must focus on skill development, hardwire a support network, and launch career planning.
  • It's time to stop thinking about how healthcare systems are "losing" staff to parenthood and to start actively supporting the parental roles of their employees in and outside of the workplace.
  • To make sure today's entry-level staff are a part of your workforce in the future, all organizations will need to become more flexible by integrating a variety of different hours, roles, locations, and responsibilities.
Healthcare organizations must commit to restoring physical and emotional well-being, tackling burnout on two levels, and providing targeted baseline emotional support for the three types of emotionally charged scenarios that healthcare employees are likely to encounter in their careers:
  • Trauma and grief
  • Moral distress
  • Compassion fatigue

To be a destination workplace for talent from all backgrounds, identities, and perspectives, you must embed diversity and inclusion in every aspect of your talent management strategy.

  • Organizations with diverse workforces — in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, gender identity, culture, language, ability, and more — and inclusive cultures are stronger businesses.
  • While embracing equity needs to be a priority for all organizations, there are multiple paths to achieving an equitable future.

Individual interventions, such as training and coaching sessions, are not enough to cultivate resilient leaders. They must be paired with an organizational approach that addresses the environment in which leaders operate.

There is a variety of technology in the market that promises to support clinicians, but leaders often struggle to prioritize solutions and lack the resources to invest in new, often unproven technologies.

  • The idea of making technology a bigger part of the clinical experience can be frightening to patients and clinicians, who are understandably wary about losing human connection. Successful tech implementations must allow clinicians to practice and top-of-license and prioritize patient care.
  • As new investments are made in AI and automation, it’s crucial that organizations continue to make equity a priority and avoid pitfalls like internalized bias that have plagued early adopters of these technologies. 

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