Nursing Staff Shortages
- Kyra Chester-Paul
- Sep 7
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 23
It’s no secret that the healthcare sector is facing major staff shortages.
Ask any healthcare provider you know, and the chances of them telling you that they are underworked are slim. Indeed, the NIH references that about half of US healthcare workers suffer from burnout, a double rate that of the general population (1).
The problem is particularly volatile for nurses. According to the Health Resources and Services Administration, the projected nursing shortages is anticipated to be on a level of hundreds of thousands of providers (2).
Nurses perform vital functions for the healthcare system; they administer medications, assess patients, transfer patients, coordinate their care, communicate with family members, and perform countless other tasks at the patient’s bedside that often go completely unrecognized. Their role in the healthcare system is absolutely critical, and without their assistance, few treatment plans would or even could be implemented.
The nursing shortage is projected to hit nonmetropolitan areas the hardest, where the Registered nurse shortages are projected to be as high as 13% (2). This will translate to very challenging environments for adequate patient care delivery.
Numerous factors are contributing to the shortages.
The first is an aging population. As individuals age, they tend to develop more health conditions, meaning that each individual requires more care than they did when they were younger and healthier. And even as many of our patients are aging, so too are our providers (2). More providers are approaching retirement age, or worse yet, retiring early due to the stressors associated with the pandemic. In sum, our patient pool is getting larger and more complex even as our provider population is getting smaller, younger, and less experienced overall.
This leads us to the next important factor contributing to provider shortages; education. As the provider shortages worsen, healthcare systems work the providers left in the system harder. As the healthcare system squeezes itself further, providers know they can make more lucrative salaries in industry (2). Jobs such as consulting, pharmaceutical or device development, or management can offer higher salaries, more autonomy, and better hours overall than many hospital provider jobs can. These market forces push providers away from education jobs.
Less educators translates to less providers coming out the pipeline which contributes, of course, to more shortages.
And more shortages lead to, of course, worsening provider burnout.
From our vantage point, it seems that the industry has caught itself in a downward spiral. The more short-staffed health systems become, the more overworked the staff that does work becomes, and the more they start looking for employment elsewhere. As these staff leave, the shortages become more pronounced, and the staff that still works there gets squeezed further.
At ReviMo, we have identified that the patient transfer process is a major contributor to caregiver burnout, patient frustrations, and inefficiencies in hospital and nursing home work flows. Over the past two years, we have interviewed dozens of caregivers, nurses, patients, physical therapists, and occupational therapists.
Again and again we hear similar themes of the inefficiencies in patient transfer. Some patients cannot be discharged because they cannot get out of bed independently. Other patients have the opposite problem; they have to be admitted to skilled nursing facilities because they cannot toilet independently. Nurses are suffering from frustration, burnout, and physical injuries from routine transfers they shouldn’t have to be performing in the first place.
NetSuite has highlighted that inefficiencies in workflow could be a contributing factor to provider shortages, which it has listed as one of the top 12 issues facing the healthcare sector.
ReviMo Niko is building an answer. Our device, which is a robotic piece of equipment, comes to the patient bedside through the assistance of a remote control. With it, patients can get out of bed independently so that they can use the bathroom, perform physical therapy, and otherwise go about their daily lives.
Our device provides relief to the nurses and caregivers that take care of these patients through improved workflow. If patients can move themselves to and from bed independently, this frees up time in nurses’ days to perform other tasks that only they can do.
Through our technological solution, we are addressing the widespread problem of nursing burnout by alleviating staff burden in the patient transfer space.
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