Taking a break from who is hiring and who was hired, we rounded up some reading on the state of the healthcare workforce. Like many things in our lives for the few years the pandemic has taken a toll on it, the healthcare workforce might be on the top of the list of disruption. With 18% of healthcare workers having left their jobs and another 12% being laid off, what are the solutions for healthcare as a whole? You can’t open a paper, magazine, or watch news and not hear about the crisis that has evolved. Here are some insights and reports.
In the News
Smartlinx Acquires Software Provider StafferLink to Streamline Workforce Operations in Healthcare
Smartlinx, a provider of workforce management solutions for senior care organizations, has acquired StafferLink, a provider of contingent staffing management software for the healthcare industry. StafferLink’s cloud-based Vendor Management System (VMS) and Agency Staffing Management (ASM) software products were purpose-built for healthcare facilities, agencies and managed service providers (MSPs) to source, manage and pay their contingent workforce.
Amae Health and Massachusetts General Hospital Collaborating to Develop Workforce Training for Comprehensive SMI Care
Amae Health, a psychiatry-led integrated care provider of outpatient physical and behavioral health services for people living with a severe mental illness (SMI), announced a new groundbreaking collaboration with the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) to support the development of the Amae Institute for professional education for care teams providing comprehensive SMI care.
CHG Healthcare Launches Nursesmart, Bringing the Market’s #1 VMS Expertise to Nurse Staffing
CHG Healthcare, a healthcare workforce solutions company, announces the launch of Nursesmart, a next-generation vendor management system (VMS) designed specifically for nurse staffing. Nursesmart builds on the proven success of Locumsmart, the #1 physician VMS, which provides access to 82% of the locum tenens market. Now, CHG extends this expertise to nursing, giving healthcare organizations greater transparency, control, and efficiency in their staffing processes.
ShiftMed and Powers Health Partner to Strengthen Healthcare Workforce
ShiftMed, an On-Demand workforce technology company, has partnered with Powers Health to expand nursing support at its Community Hospital, one of four premier healthcare facilities in Powers Health, nationally recognized for quality care through a full range of inpatient and outpatient programs. This collaboration brings Indiana its first-ever On-Demand technology implementation.
Bridging the Skills Gap: How ArcLight Academy is Transforming Career Transitions in San Antonio’s Healthcare Sector
In the dynamic landscape of San Antonio’s $42 billion medical industry, a local nonprofit is pioneering an innovative approach to workforce development and unemployment mitigation. ArcLight Academy has emerged as a critical solution provider, addressing the twin challenges of industry skill shortages and workforce displacement.
$200,000 Gift Expands Healthcare Education and Workforce in Maricopa County
Arizona needs more workers in healthcare. Across the state, there is a shortage of health providers making it hard for patients to get the care they need. To help bridge the gap, AZ Blue is giving $200,000 in aid to future health workers. The gift, from AZ Blue Health Choice and the AZ Blue Foundation, provides need-based support for hundreds of students at Maricopa Community Colleges.
To Read
The State of Nursing in 2025: Engagement Trends Signal Need for Investment and Action
Press Ganey, the leader in experience measurement, analytics, and strategic advisory services for health systems and health plans, announced the release of its latest research report: “Nurse Experience 2025.” Drawing on data from nearly 500,000 registered nurses and clinical staff from Press Ganey’s national Nursing Excellence benchmark, the study identifies rising expectations and shifting engagement patterns that threaten the stability of the healthcare workforce. While overall turnover has shown signs of improvement, the study finds recent declines in engagement—particularly among advanced practice providers (APPs)—signaling the risk of a potential backslide.
McKinsey Health Institute
Heartbeat of health: Reimagining the healthcare workforce of the future – By Pooja Kumar, Tania Holt, and Yenli Wong with Marilyn Kimeu – Addressing the healthcare worker shortage is an opportunity to profoundly advance health worldwide, adding years to life and life to years. McKinsey Health Institute’s analysis finds that closing this shortage could avert 189 million years of life lost to early death and lived with disability, accounting for 7 percent of all disease burden (see appendix, “Disease burden and GDP impact sizing methodology”). To put this into context, closing the shortage would have as much positive benefit as eliminating the disease burden stemming from maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality conditions.
DHI Insights
Immigration and the U.S. healthcare workforce: A system in crisis – This four-part series explores the root causes, global dimensions, and potential solutions to healthcare’s most pressing workforce challenge. For decades, the U.S. healthcare system has relied on immigrant workers—especially nurses—to help fill persistent staffing gaps. But as immigration policies tighten and more nurses leave the profession than enter it, the nation now faces an unprecedented nursing shortage with serious consequences for patient care.
World Health Organization
Nursing workforce grows, but inequities threaten global health goals – The global nursing workforce has grown from 27.9 million in 2018 to 29.8 million in 2023, but wide disparities in the availability of nurses remain across regions and countries, according to the State of the World’s Nursing 2025 report, published by the World Health Organization (WHO), International Council of Nurses (ICN) and partners. Inequities in the global nursing workforce leave many of the world’s population without access to essential health services, which could threaten progress towards universal health coverage (UHC), global health security and the health-related development goals.
FiscalNote
2025 Health Care Outlook: Key Policies and Industry Trends – By Olivia Barrow, Writer, FiscalNote – Almost halfway through 2025, the health care policy landscape is dominated by looming funding cuts that could affect all sectors of health care, from workforce training to medical research to access to care. Health care organizations around the country are also keeping an eye on emerging technologies and challenges, including workforce challenges, generative AI’s evolving role in medicine, and the growing need for mental and behavioral health treatment. Read on to explore the health care regulations, policy debates, and opportunities that are keeping government affairs teams busy in 2025.
New Edition of The Lancet — Actions and Policies That Make U.S. Health Workforce Less Representative Will Harm Health and Hike Costs, warns Institute for Policy Solutions (at JHU-SON)
A new letter in The Lancet warns that decisions across sectors that help make the US health workforce less representative of, and therefore less responsive to, the communities it serves will harm population health and increase care costs. In “Population health and a representative U.S. health care workforce,” (Vincent Guilamo-Ramos, Marco Thimm-Kaiser, Adam Benzekri, and Danielle McCamey), the authors underscore the benefits of a representative health workforce (where there is concordance between patients and their providers in characteristics such as race, ethnicity, language or cultural experiences); the negative impact of recent high-profile judicial rulings, executive actions, and private sector decisions that undermine provider-patient concordance; and the need to unequivocally be guided by science in fixing every aspect of America’s broken health system.
New Book Offers a Blueprint to Unlocking the Future of Healthcare Workforce Management with AI
Nurse scheduling and staffing remains one of the most complex challenges for hospitals and health systems. With more than 15 years of experience in driving operational excellence in healthcare systems, Dr. Dani Bowie, DNP, RN, NE-BC, specializes in leading innovative staffing and scheduling technology initiatives that boost nurse engagement and cut labor costs. Dr. Bowie’s new book, “Reimagine Workforce Management with AI: a Roadmap for Healthcare Leaders,” chronicles her journey with artificial intelligence (AI) over the past decade full of starts, pauses, failures, restarts and successes.
ICYMI
And ICYMI – Experts weigh in with predictions on targeting workforce issues with AI.
