The pursuit of long-term care workers requires a more targeted strategy, say researchers who completed a study showing how other healthcare sectors have started to recover from staff shortages quicker.
“Given the high demand for long-term care workers, targeted attention is needed to recruit job-seeking healthcare workers and to retain those currently in these jobs to lessen turnover,” authors Bianca K. Frogner, Ph.D., and Janette S. Dill, Ph.D., wrote in an analysis published Friday in JAMA Health Forum.
Current conditions are ripe for creating special approaches and achieving progress toward solving long-term care’s particular changes, they said.
The observational study compared turnover rates before the pandemic (January 2019 through March 2020), to the first nine months of the public health crisis (April 2020 to December 2020) and a later period of it (January 2021 to October 2021).
Findings showed that overall healthcare turnover rates peaked during the first nine months of the pandemic but largely recovered during the later period — except for long-term care workers and physicians.
Among long-term care workers, turnover rates increased from the second period (around 5.7%) to the final period (around 5.9%).
“Long-term care workers and health assistants and aides (including nursing assistants, home care aides, and medical assistants) have been highlighted throughout the pandemic as a particularly vulnerable group of employees,” Frogner and Dill wrote. Frogner is a professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Washington, while Dill is an associate professor in the Division of Health Policy and Management at University of Minnesota.
“Too often, assistants and aides have no paid sick leave and/or adequate childcare, leaving them to choose between staying employed or caring for their personal health and the health of their families,” they added.
They concluded that the findings among long-term care workers “warrant attention given their persistently high and increasing exit rates.”
