Hospitals Keep Facing Staff Shortages – Why?

The pandemic was pure chaos everywhere. But if you’re looking at industries, then healthcare probably got it the worst.

The makeshift tents in the parking lots, no visitors allowed anywhere, people wearing masks and gloves, everyone rushing around… Thankfully, that’s all over now, and you’d think things have gone back to normal. 

But if you work in a hospital, normal is a long way off. 

The crisis around COVID has been gone for some time now, but hospitals still can’t find enough staff. 

How? Where are all the doctors, nurses, and techs? Why haven’t the numbers bounced back yet? But it’s not even that; The fact is that, in some hospitals, it’s gotten even worse since then.

Which begs the question – How did this happen?

COVID Didn’t Cause the Shortages – It Exposed Them

You look online and see all those ads for anesthesiology jobs, surgeon jobs, pediatricians, nurses… How come there’s not enough of anyone? 

Everyone tends to blame the pandemic for all the hospitals’ troubles, but the cracks were here long before anyone knew of COVID. For years, hospitals ran on skeleton crews and administrators called it efficiency. For the staff, though, it was survival, nothing more. 

And when the pandemic came, everyone could see it. At that point, being short-staffed wasn’t just stressful; it became impossible.

What happened is that shifts that were already long turned into long hauls. Days off were out of the question, and on top of that, because of extreme exhaustion, the staff had to face losing patients who were often alone, with no families around to say goodbye. If you were sick and needed to be off work, in some hospitals, you still had to show up. 

Workers slept in hospitals because it was the more ‘reasonable’ way compared to going home and then coming back in a couple of hours.

And (unfortunately) none of this went away when the crisis ended. 

So yeah… a lot of people left. Quite a few of those were experienced professionals who decided to retire earlier than planned. A lot of them were also in the middle of their careers, nurses and doctors in their 30s and 40s, who had just had enough of the profession altogether and quit cold turkey. 

They couldn’t do it anymore, and can you blame them? 

Now here’s the real kicker: you can’t replace this kind of experience in a few days. 

It takes years for a nurse to complete their training, and it takes even longer for doctors and specialists. On the outside, things look pretty normal, but the fact is that hospitals are still trying to get back on their feet and recover a workforce that was already fragile to begin with.

So don’t blame the pandemic for the fire – it just made sure everyone could see it. 

What’s Keeping the Shortage Going

Here’s what’s really happening. 

More Patients Means More Pressure

Nobody likes to think about it (let alone admit it), but we’re all getting older. 

The baby boomer generation is now at a point where health stuff is piling up, which means more knee replacements, more heart surgeries, more hospital stays, more chronic conditions. For hospitals, that means they’re seeing more and more people who need serious and specialized care. 

You can’t have surgery without an anesthesiologist, and you can’t treat tough cases without ICU nurses. 

The number of beds is the same, but the work that’s happening is a whole lot heavier. 

You Can’t Train People Overnight

So why don’t hospitals just hire more nurses and doctors, right? Oh, if only it were that simple. 

You can’t rush this kind of thing. Becoming a nurse takes years of school, plus months and months of hands-on work under supervision. And if you plan on working in the ICU or helping with anesthesia, that’s even longer.

Becoming a doctor takes even longer. They’re in training for a decade before they can work on their own.

Now think about losing thousands of experienced people at once, and you’ll realize that there’s no quick fix. 

Burnout Didn’t Go Anywhere

The pandemic didn’t burn out on its way out; it’s still very much here. Being a medical professional is stressful and exhausting, so burnout is more frequent than anyone is willing to admit. 

So, in order to fight it, the staff cut back on their hours and switched to part-time because full-time doesn’t seem possible. Some walk away and never look back. That means that, even when a hospital has a certain number of workers and that number seems sufficient, those folks aren’t working the hours they used to. 

Conclusion

Once the storm passes, the cracks in the foundation don’t fix themselves.

And truth be told, staff shortages in hospitals were here way before the pandemic hit us, so we can’t really point our fingers at one single event and leave it at that.

The problem is there. And we know what it is – long-term understaffing, patient demand that keeps on rising, staff burnout, and the lack of workforce training. All of that combined keeps this problem alive.

So, how do we fix things from here?

Crossing our fingers and hoping for the best, really hard just won’t do it. What we need is a real coordinated effort and some big systemic changes to the entire healthcare system. It sounds dramatic, but it really isn’t. Our world got modern, and with a modern world came modern problems. 

And those modern problems require modern solutions, not ancient ones.