Nurses and other healthcare workers are leaving the profession in record numbers. And that isn’t just a pandemic-related phenomenon, according to a report released Thursday by the American Federation of Teachers.
AFT represents nurses and other healthcare professionals; teachers; paraprofessionals and school-related personnel; higher education faculty and staff; local, state and federal government employees; and early childhood educators.
“Healthcare professionals knew long before COVID-19 that working conditions had been deteriorating for years,” AFT President Randi Weingarten said in a statement. “Then came the pandemic. For nearly three years, they’ve worked under unprecedented challenges — while for-profit institutions made record profits.”
By February 2022, a poll showed that 23% of healthcare workers were ready to quit, according to the report.
Weingarten said the problem of understaffing, which created much of the burnout and discontent, is fixable, but the steps must be taken by the facilities themselves. One step he proposed is to allow healthcare workers a voice in the process and engage them in the day-to-day workings of the facilities where they work, especially where safety is concerned.
“When the people providing the care are seen, heard and respected, the patients receiving the care do better too,” Weingarten said.
The union’s other suggested strategies for boosting the pipeline of nurses and other healthcare professionals:
- Improving recruitment (and diversity in the workforce) through high school career and technical education programs, apprenticeships and nursing bridge programs.
- Expanding targeted financial aid and loan repayment programs, including the National Health Service Corps and the Nurse Faculty Loan Program.
- Enacting federal and state laws mandating safe staffing ratios for the whole care team, including safe staffing requirements in governmental regulations and negotiating safe staffing levels in collective bargaining agreements.
- Banning mandatory overtime through a wide-ranging approach including federal and state legislation, regulation and collective bargaining agreements.
- Encouraging Congress to pass the federal Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act and working with state legislatures on greater safety protections.
- Pushing for pandemic protections in federal law, such as an Occupational Safety and Health Administration standard and a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services emergency preparedness rule.
- Advocating for funding and programs to support health professionals’ mental health.
- Working at the federal and state levels to increase oversight of mergers and acquisitions in the healthcare industry, including their effects on care.
- Making shared governance part of the collective bargaining agreement, like the partnership between Kaiser Permanente and the Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals and other unions.
- Championing the right of healthcare workers to form unions, and fighting employer “union-busting” tactics.
