Facing steep growth in demand, constant turnover and employee retirements, Alaska’s health care industry has a staggering need for new workers, a new report says.
“To meet those variables, we have to find over 9,400 new health care workers every single year,” Jared Kosin, executive director of the Alaska Hospital and Healthcare Association, said on Monday.
Kosin, who presented the information to the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce, characterized the workforce situation as a good news-bad news story.
“I’m like, ‘Hey, we have these opportunities. We have jobs open now!’ Exclamation point. Challenges: We have jobs open now! Exclamation point,” he said in his presentation. “Something that’s so great and so opportunistic is also one of our biggest challenges, because we can’t fill all these jobs.”
The numbers Kosin presented at the chamber meeting were from his association’s newly released analysis of Alaska’s health care workforce. The report, by Rain Coast Data of Juneau, was the latest in a series of annual workforce studies commissioned by the association.
The report quantified the health care industry’s economic heft in Alaska.
It is the state’s largest employer, with more than 44,000 workers representing 11% of Alaska’s jobs, according to the report. Their total $3.4 billion in wages amount to 13% of those earned in the state, according to the report. Wage growth since 2016 has been 47%, well above the statewide wage growth over the same period of about 26%, Kosin said. That growth in wages was probably influenced by the dire needs created by the COVID-19 pandemic, he noted.
As demand for health care grows, the biggest single need is for registered nurses, Kosin said in the presentation. Of the more than 9,400 new workers that Alaska needs each year, 1,400 are new registered nurses, said.
For now, the supply of new nurses and other health care workers is not close to meeting that demand, especially for those educated and trained in Alaska, according to the workforce report.
An expected 346 new registered nurses are expected to be trained in Alaska this year, less than a quarter of the number of new nurses the state needs this year. The number of newly trained nursing aides in Alaska will be only half the total needed. And only 11 new Alaska-trained certified medical aides are expected this year, a tiny fraction of the 755 expected to be needed, according to the report.
Alaska’s aging population, reflected in the decline of working-age residents, among other metrics, will also affect health care workforce needs, Kosin said.
There will be a decided shift to the long-term and in-home services that the elderly need, he said, making traditional hospital care less prominent.
There is already a mismatch between available facilities and services and the long-term care that is needed, Kosin said. Surveys of association members have revealed that one out of every seven occupied hospital beds is now being used by patients who no longer need hospitalization – but who have nowhere else to go to get continuing care over the longer term, he said.
Those extended stays range from 30 days to six months, amounting to over 43,000 of what are known as “avoidable days” and $188 million in costs, he said.
“So you have these people that literally do not need to be there and yet they’re in the most expensive environment of care,” he said. At some point, insurance, Medicare or Medicaid reimbursement will no longer cover the costs, he said.