The healthcare industry has faced unprecedented challenges since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the impact has strained the workforce. But despite higher rates of burnout and stress among healthcare workers during the pandemic, the industry has reported lower unemployment rates than other fields.
That’s according to a new research paper published in JAMA, which revealed working in healthcare and/or hospital-based healthcare was associated with a lower increase in unemployment from the pre-pandemic days compared to pandemic periods.
The findings make sense at face value, as the healthcare industry has faced huge demands since the onset of COVID in early 2020. The industry has been plagued by job vacancies, and many healthcare organizations have been forced to up wages and boost incentives to attract and retain their workforce. The added stress and trauma of the pandemic has also worsened burnout among physicians and healthcare workers, with many more planning to leave the industry over the next few years.
Researchers from the Department of Health Care Management at the Wharton School in Philadelphia and the Department of Health Systems, Management and Policy at the Colorado School of Public Health in Aurora examined changes in unemployment among healthcare workers from January 2015 to April 2022. The sample included nearly 508,000 healthcare worker responses to a voluntary survey called the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series Current Population Survey, which is public-use data.
Within the healthcare space, researchers found unemployment differences among specialties. For example, lower-income professions, including therapists, technicians and aides, were associated with higher unemployment rates than physicians. According to researchers, this may be a reflection of how federal aid was deployed to healthcare organizations “and which service lines were prioritized,” wrote research paper authors Sasmira Matta, MHS, a PhD student at the Wharton School, and Lauren H. Nicholas, PhD, MPP, associate professor at the Colorado School of Public Health.
“Comparing prepandemic and pandemic periods, relative to physicians, there was a significantly larger increase in unemployment reported by therapists and technicians, aides and other [healthcare workers],” Matta and Nicholas found.
The study also revealed individuals with bachelor’s degrees reported significantly less unemployment relative to least educated persons in the sample when compared to the prepandemic and pandemic periods.
They noted there were some limitations of the study, including the inability to measure the share of healthcare workers who exited the labor force altogether. They also were limited in measuring the associations between employment and COVID-19, and they reported limited power to understand interactions between professions and demographics.
“Regardless, these findings are relevant because fewer job opportunities in health care have implications for the quality of care delivery, [healthcare worker] satisfaction and patient outcomes,” they concluded.
Amy joined TriMed Media as a Senior Writer for HealthExec after covering home care for three years. When not writing about all things healthcare, she fulfills her lifelong dream of becoming a pirate by sailing in regattas and enjoying rum. Fun fact: she sailed 333 miles across Lake Michigan in the Chicago Yacht Club "Race to Mackinac."