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If there was a Spotify Wrapped for the most commonly heard phrases in the healthcare industry in 2022, “staffing shortages” would probably be No. 1 on every health system CEO’s list. With nurses, lab techs, home health aides, and numerous other positions facing widespread shortages, you may be asking yourself, “Are there any healthcare jobs not in short supply right now?”
Healthcare Brew set out to answer that question, and it turns out the answer is…not many.
Analysts from consulting firm Mercer projected in their most recent healthcare labor market report (published in 2021) that every state would have “major” labor shortages by 2026. John Derse, a senior partner at Mercer who leads the firm’s healthcare provider industry practice, told Healthcare Brew that while the data is “a little bit anecdotal,” based on the recent projections, “I don’t see anywhere where it’s getting better. I don’t see any positions that are improving.”
But which positions are facing the worst shortages depends on where you look.
For instance, Mercer analysts project there will be a surplus of nurses in the South and the Southwest in the next few years. At the same time, there will be “significant shortages” of nurses in nearly half of all states, with the most severe shortages concentrated in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Colorado, Illinois, and Massachusetts, according to the healthcare labor market report.
The best and the worst of 2023
The healthcare jobs in the best shape staffing-wise are nonclinical roles, like revenue cycle management, according to David Mitchell, a partner in Mercer’s career consulting business and a specialist in the healthcare industry. That is because these jobs can be done remotely, so it expands the talent pool, he said.
On the flip side, Mitchell thinks that medical assistantships will be the most in-demand healthcare jobs in 2023. All types of facilities in “every region of the US” are seeing “critical shortages” of medical assistants, he said.
“So many providers are making this transition from fee-for-service to value-based care, and there’s just a lot more outpatient medicine going on,” said Mitchell. “That [medical assistant] role becomes like a linchpin in the organization for handling so much of the patient intake and the triage, and some of the less acute aspects of patient care where there simply isn’t the registered nurse supply to do that.”