Reasons for Workforce Shortages in Healthcare

Workforce Shortage in Healthcare
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Workforce Shortage in Healthcare
Across the world, a shortage in healthcare workers has contributed towards the stifling of efficient care and service delivery to patients. This is mainly because hospitals and other healthcare facilities are often understaffed and incapable of achieving the best possible staffing ratios that can help improve on care delivery (Cartmill, Comans, Clark, Ash, & Sheppard, 2012). Just as the problem appears to affect the entire world, the reasons behind a workforce shortage in the healthcare industry remain equally consistent across the world. For this reason, it becomes imperative to assess this shortage, its impacts, and its possible solutions as a means of establishing working remedies to the global shortage of healthcare workers.
Reasons for Workforce Shortage
In the USA, just like the rest of the world, some of the leading reasons behind a shortage in healthcare workers are rooted in the inability of the healthcare industry, in combination with the government, to adjust for the changes in the needs of the population as far as healthcare is concerned.
Aging Population
Across the world, countries, just like the USA, are experiencing societies in which the aging population appears to be growing exponentially (Shi & Singh, 2017). This increase in the number of aged individuals similarly results in an increase in the number of healthcare workers that are required to provide specialized care for the aging population. At the same time, as the number of aging individuals continues to rise, there is a higher demand for healthcare specialists focusing on the physical and mental health disorders and illnesses that plague this population (Kuehn, 2007). Unfortunately, the number of specialists and healthcare workers competent enough to meet the healthcare needs of the aging is growing at a slower rate compared to the rate of people aging. Inevitably, this leads to a situation in which there is a large population of aged individuals that are in needs of healthcare services that are incapable of being met by the industry in its current composition. The result is a workforce shortage among said healthcare workers.
Aging Workforce
Taking into consideration the fact that many individuals in the general population are aging and creating a need for specialized healthcare workers for the aged, it is equally ital. to consider the rate at which healthcare workers are aging. Presently, the number of healthcare workers that are still working is incapable of satisfying the demand for healthcare workers and services across the world. At the same time, the number of aged healthcare workers is equally rising, resulting in an aged workforce that is struggling to perform its services as efficiently as possible. One of the factors that contributes towards this situation is the fact that healthcare workers have to undergo long periods of learning before they can become specialists or certified practitioners (Shi & Singh, 2017). This discourages many healthcare workers from pursuing further education and becoming specialists. Additionally, the fact that many healthcare professionals in sensitive fields such as surgery can easily compromise the quality of their work as they continue to age results in a further shortage of workers. This combination results in a further aggravated shortage of health workers as the professionals in question continue to age.
Limited Capacity in Educational Programs
Third, it is vital to acknowledge that the facilities that are tasked with providing healthcare education to prospective professionals do not have the capacity to educate enough workers to satisfy the demand in question. Many university programs in healthcare related fields such as medicine and nursing are often forced to turn away many applicants, even when some are clearly qualified, due to their capacity constraints (Short, 2016). Understandably, many of these institutions cannot simply admit more students as this stands to compromise the quality of the education they provide and the competency of the professionals they produce. Consequently, the healthcare industry ends up starved of healthcare workers, further contributing to the global shortage of said workers.
Short-Term Solutions
Better Access to Healthcare Services
As far as suitable solutions to the shortage of healthcare workers are concerned, ensuring that frontline healthcare services are more accessible is an important step to addressing this worker shortage. By ensuring that mid-level and community healthcare professionals can actively contribute towards the provision of frontline services, the shortage of said workers is likely to be temporarily addressed (Kuehn, 2007). This is because better access will result in the decreased number of patients that fail to access hea...