The Future of Healthcare Employment

I am not a nurse, but I work for nurses. 

My name is Kalyn Weber, and I lead Clinician Experience at connectRN. My team is responsible for delivering employment services and holistic work-life support to the tens of thousands of nursing professionals employed by connectRN. My background is in public health, and I’ve spent most of my career prior to connectRN designing strategies for health and wellbeing that include a deep focus on the upstream drivers, or social determinants, of health.

When I joined connectRN in 2019, I truly could not have been more excited to work with nursing professionals. Nurses and nursing aides and assistants are the heart of healthcare, providing some of the meaningful patient care and interactions that enable the entire system to thrive.

Nurses continue to face extraordinary challenges.

To take this systemic approach to thinking about nurse wellbeing, we have to really understand some of the challenges healthcare professionals and nurses are facing. Without even looking at the data, anyone who has any experience with the healthcare system can agree: Nursing is not an easy job. And if we look at the data, we can see that it’s empirically backed up that nursing is super, super hard! There’s occupational hazards, high risks of abuse (both verbal and physical), and bullying… and if we look at some of these statistics for different populations within the nursing community, especially clinicians of color, they can be much more sobering.

We then zoom out beyond the bedside and layer in the labor supply chain issues that many of us know all too well. We know that the healthcare workforce is an aging population, that roughly one in two RNs in the United States are over the age of 50 and are deservedly retiring at rapid rates, much faster than we are able to replace them. We know that nursing schools and universities are experiencing their own challenges hiring faculty, and that many are turning away qualified nurse candidates as a result.

Well before COVID-19, this “shortage” contributed to increased patient ratios and additional stress and administrative burden for nursing professionals. Then the pandemic happened, and nursing, which has always been a really, really tough job, got a lot harder.

So where are we today? 

• 78% of nurses are burnt out

• 68% of nurses say their jobs have changed considerably—and mostly for the worse

• 25% of nurses are likely to leave the field altogether due to the pandemic

• 75% of facilities face difficulties managing the ability to consistently fill shifts

Essentially, nurses are thinking about leaving the healthcare industry altogether, and of course, this is creating and amplifying some of the staffing challenges that we are all dealing with today.

The good news is it is not all gloom and doom. 

Nurses still have a lot of hope. The majority (70%) are saying they still think nursing is a really great career, and 64% are still recommending that new nurses join the profession. We think if we do our jobs right at connectRN, we can continue to increase these percentages and ensure that this population, which is shrinking today, can really thrive and grow for years to come.

We know that as the US population continues to age, the need and demand for nurses and healthcare experts in general is going to continue to grow. So, what does this mean?

It means we need innovation. We really need disruption. It’s the space of supporting healthcare workers holistically and thinking about them and the people in their lives. Thinking about their holistic needs, the social determinants of health, how we can show up to support this community so that they can really live out their calling and deliver the kind of care they really entered this tough profession to do.

So how do we do this at connectRN? 

We look at support and really meeting clinicians where they are through a few different lenses: opportunity, connection, and support.

Opportunity is the amazing ability to have different work opportunities that align with one’s career goals. It’s also the opportunity for advancement and new learning. How can we support nurses along their entire nursing career journey, from the moment they exit nursing school through their retirement? And, as we’re seeing today, even supporting some folks who are actually coming out of retirement to rejoin the workforce on a temporary basis as well.

Connection is also a really, really critical part of support. Nursing itself is such a strong identity, and what that means is that there’s something about being a nurse that really only other nurses can understand and relate to. We’re fostering that peer-to-peer support so when a nurse is having a really tough day, they have a peer to lean on who says, “Hey, that was my week last week. Let me tell you how I coped. Let’s get through this together. I’m here for you.”

Facilitating these connections outside of the traditional care center space, and connecting peers with one another virtually for support and mentorship, is so powerful. This is something we’ve spent a lot of time building at connectRN, that we’ve seen a huge need for, and that we’ve been really proud to deliver to the nursing community.

As we look ahead, we need to continue to embrace healthcare employment trends.

• Pay Matters: We all have a certain emotional connection to what we make and earn. It’s not just our livelihood. It’s how we feel valued. It’s how we feel respected. And, certainly, this became far more transparent during the pandemic, where we saw historic dynamics in terms of how pay worked out. I believe this has changed the narrative in an unhelpful way, because what we know from talking to nurses is that we need to continue to recognize that and think beyond pay to how we can really deliver holistic support to this community so they want to keep showing up to do the work that we as a society really need them to do.

• Flexibility Is the Norm: The healthcare community has been slower to adopt the concept of flexibility than other industries. If nurses can design a work schedule around when they have childcare, or access to transportation, or when they’re taking classes to advance their career, it’s not just going to eliminate some of the stress in their life; it actually also helps improve their lifetime earnings as well. I’m excited to be thinking about schedule flexibility is new ways at connectRN to deliver on this as a need-to-have, not just a nice-to-have, to the connectRN community. 

• Stigmas around “Agency” Nurses are Harmful: We talk about this all the time, both within our nursing community as well as with our partners. There is a pervasive thought in the healthcare industry around agency workers being more costly for lower quality. This is not only really harmful in terms of the working environment, it’s also increasingly inaccurate. The number of nurses today who are looking for a less “traditional” way to work is rapidly growing and becoming increasingly diverse both in terms of backgrounds and skill sets.  We need to continue to push for and create inclusive spaces for different types of professionals

• We Can Keep Healthcare Personal through Tech & Innovation: I think a lot of folks who have worked patient care for a while have developed a bit of an aversion to technology… which I totally get in many scenarios. We think about technology as a powerful partner in healthcare to remove the headache from healthcare and really help folks live out their calling without being weighed down by the administrative, technical, or socioeconomic barriers that exist and prevent doing good work in nursing. Schedule flexibility is an easy one to think about. Schedule puzzles that couldn’t be solved on paper are suddenly unlocked when you add technology. The same is true for CEU and credentialing management, as well as access to social and professional support. Technology is really fostering connections that weren’t possible before.

As we move ahead, I think it's important to remember that nurses are people first. 

We talk a lot about person-centered patient care, and we forget that the people caring for people… are people too! But if you talk to nursing professionals and listen to their stories, it is always so inspiring. When we ask our community why they chose nursing, it’s because they wanted to have an impact—they really care for, admire, and respect the aging population and want to show up and deliver amazing care to them. Hearing these stories and making sure that we’re building holistic support around a community that so deeply deserves our commitment is really why we are here at connectRN.

And the best part is we know that if we deliver on this mission, the entire healthcare ecosystem is going to thrive as well. A nurse who feels very satisfied is going to show up. She’s going to want to be a better worker for her supervisor, she’s going to want to deliver better patient care to her residents, and she’s going to want to be a better partner to her colleagues too. And we've seen examples of this time and time again, working with our community partners across the country.

If you’re open to continuing the conversation, I would love to connect with you.