Employment at nursing homes is 10.5% below pre-pandemic levels compared to 3.3% for hospitals and 1.6% for physician offices, according to a study by Thuy Nguyen, assistant professor of health management and policy at U-M’s School of Public Health, and colleagues.
The shortage of nursing home workers—and health care workers in general—isn’t new, but the study can help inform policy change, including a federal proposal targeting staffing levels at skilled nursing facilities, or SNFs, said Nguyen, who is lead author of the study. Nguyen and co-authors Christopher Whaley of Brown University, Kosali Simon of Indiana University and Jonathan Cantor of RAND Corp. used U.S. Census Bureau national labor statistics to assess employment recovery since an initial decrease in employment after the March 2020 public health emergency through the end of 2022.
The study fills a void in research by offering more recent data than typically available to evaluate the broad health care workforce, says Nguyen, who addresses the worker shortage below.