Registered nurses in the intensive care unit don their personal protective equipment before entering a covid-19 patient’s room at Allegheny Health Network’s Jefferson Hospital on Jan. 13.
Story by MEGAN GUZA | Photos by SHANE DUNLAP
January 30, 2022
The stress of a two-year pandemic combined with an aging workforce and shortage of teachers has led to a critical staffing shortage among nurses.
Joy Peters, chief nursing officer for Allegheny Health Network’s Jefferson Hospital, said staffing levels in almost every department at Jefferson is down 30% to 40% of what they should be.
“Our census (number of patients) is high,” Peters said, “but we don’t have enough employees to take care of these patients that are coming in.”
It trickles down into the non-medical departments, too. For example, environmental services employees focus almost entirely on patient rooms, and they clean other areas of the hospital complex only once or twice a week.
“Everyone who is working here is working more,” Peters said, “and they’re at the point now where they don’t want to.”
Health care systems in the area have more open positions now than they did a year ago. As of early January, Excela Health in Westmoreland County had 144 open positions compared with 111 at the same time in 2021. Across AHN, there were around 800 open positions in early January; there were 300 this time last year, officials said earlier this month.
The issue is not unique to Jefferson, AHN or even Pittsburgh, nor is it a new one.
“Historically, nursing shortages are a cyclical phenomenon,” said Lauren Rewers, a researcher focusing on nursing at the health care research firm Advisory Board.
She pointed to shortages in the 1980s and early 2000s but said those were really supply-and-demand mismatches.
“I think right now what we’re seeing is not necessarily one of those cyclical shortages, but I think a potentially long-term problem that’s a little bit more severe than what we’ve seen in the past,” Rewers said.
There is no simple explanation and certainly no simple fix, she said. Higher retirement rates among the most experienced nursing professions and a severe lack of nursing school instructors contribute to the issue, she said.
“The jury’s still out in terms of the long-term implications of what’s happening to the workforce, but I think in the short-term we’re going to continue to see shortages, high use of agency labor, and I think that is going to be felt not only by patients but also by those nurses who are working right now.”
The future of the profession is fuzzy, she said.
“It’s going to depend so much on both the demand and the health care that’s needed. And when the dust settles and if the dust settles, where folks really want to work in the health system,” she said.
In a state government effort to address the issue, Gov. Tom Wolf signed fast-tracked legislation Wednesday to help keep burned-out health care workers on board. It authorizes $225 million in funding, mostly for hospitals to give workers retention and recruitment payments.
The money is from federal pandemic relief signed by President Joe Biden last March.
Megan Guza is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Megan at 412-380-8519, mguza@triblive.com or via Twitter.