A healthcare worker hands another staffer money
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The likelihood that long-term care and other providers survive severe staffing shortages and COVID-19 crisis will depend on their ability to change how healthcare workers are treated so they can continue their crucial work to the sector, according to a new article published in the JAMA Health Forum. 

“If burnout becomes too great and sufficient numbers of personal care aides, nurses, and physicians leave practice, the result could be an implosion of the healthcare system,” Harvard’s David M. Cutler, Ph.D., wrote. 

Burnout, although it’s been a long-time issue in healthcare, has emerged as a central problem for the industry due to the public health emergency. A December study found that nurses were 20% more likely to have thought about suicide within the past year when compared to the general workforce.

The Department of Health and Human Services last week pledged $103 million in grants to help curb healthcare worker burnout and staffing shortages. 

Data has also shown that 35% of frontline healthcare workers won’t or are not likely to still be working in the field in five to 10 years, noted Cutler, an applied economic professor at Harvard.  

Even though wage increases are usually the first answer, it hasn’t stopped the overall reduction in available workers for the industry, leaving providers stretched and using more staffing agency employees. Cutler argued the only way for providers to respond to the changing environment is to keep workers happy. 

“Healthcare workers take pride in the good work they do, but they experience great frustration in how difficult it is to practice,” he wrote. 

“At the beginning of the pandemic, pride was the dominant emotion — recall the throngs of people cheering health care workers at the end of each shift. As the pandemic has entered its third year, frustration is replacing it,” he added. 

Cutler emphasized the need for workplace improvements now. Positive changes for workers can include more use of telehealth as a means to help staff be less fearful of the environment conditions.

“How will we feel if we finally manage to survive the COVID-19 pandemic, only to find that healthcare workers want nothing to do with what comes next,” he concluded