MI report paints grim picture of health care shortages

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — A new report ranks the outlook of 36 different health care jobs in the state of Michigan.

Released on May 16, it’s the second iteration of the Michigan Healthcare Workforce Index, which the Michigan Health Council first put together in 2023. It looks at growth, wage, turnover and shortage data for the 36 health jobs to rank the expected “health” of each occupation over the next ten years.

The top three ranked health care jobs were optometrists, physician group and nurse practitioners. The bottom three were dental hygienists, dental assistants and nursing assistants.

The goal of the report is to learn where the biggest needs are in the industry, MHC President and CEO Craig Donahue explained.

“We’ve known anecdotally for a long time that we’ve had challenges in multiple professions,” he said. “From my experience, this is one of the first times where we’ve been able to comprehensively look at all of the occupations that make up that healthcare system and see where they stand and see where we need to put our priorities and our resources in order to make a difference.”

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Last year’s report was to establish a baseline. The MHC will need to continue doing the report over a longer time span to create more stable data, Donahue said. There’s still work to be done to discover what the report is saying about the health care system.

For example, all the occupations moved in rank between 2023 and 2024. Several moved only a couple of spots and 11 only moved one or two spots, but the nurse anesthetist occupation moved 23 spots, dropping from No. 4 to No. 27. This was mostly because of the way the wages were calculated, Donahue said.

“We need to look to do a deeper dive into some of these positions, these occupations that shifted position and understand why, and if it’s a data issue or if it’s really something that’s happening in the field,” Donahue said. “That’s what we need to do next in terms of the content and the information that we share about the index going throughout the rest of the year.”

The report paints a grim picture. Most occupations are projected to have shortages between now and 2033, while only four occupations are expected to have a surplus of workers.

One position, home health and personal care aides, is expected to have a shortage of more than 170,000 openings within the next decade, the MHC found.

Out of the 36 roles, that occupation ranked No. 22 in 2024 and No. 24 in 2023.

“It’s a demanding job and the pay is not great. It’s one of those jobs at the lower end of the pay scale that are tough to get people to stay in long term,” Donahue said.

One solution the MHC is working on getting people interested in the healthcare field earlier on and then giving them more opportunities to move up the ladder once in the field.

When it comes to home health and personal care aides, for example, he said there needs to be a better pathway for people working in those positions to move up the ladder while staying in the health care system.

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At the same time, there should be a focus on getting more people interested in that pathway that can start as aides.

“So it’s not just, ‘I’m taking this job and this is where I stay,'” he said. “We need to have that cycle of folks coming through, learning, moving up a ladder and so on and so forth. I think is where we need to try to focus our efforts.”

Donahue said there are several factors leading to worker shortages in health care, including an aging population and wages.

He said it’s important to make it easy to get information about working in the healthcare system, and the MHC is working on getting K-12 students interested in the health care profession early in their exploration process.

It’s also working on creating a program that will make it easier to job shadow someone in the health care system, and finding ways to retain those already in the industry, as they face challenges like stress and high volumes of work.

“The pandemic … had a tremendous impact on this problem. This is not a new problem, just to be clear. This has been an issue that’s gone on for decades, our organization has been in health care workforce for 80 years. We’ve not solved the problem yet,” Donahue said with a chuckle. “But the pandemic really shone a light on how challenged we are and how critical it is to start to make impact today.”

He said it’s important for multiple stakeholders to work together to find solutions, and to make sure they’re “rowing in the same direction.”

“This data really just paints a picture,” he said. “Now we need to transition to, ‘What are the solutions?’ Where do we put our resources to make a difference in the short term, and what do we need to do to plan long term to try to change the needle on this, so that we aren’t in a place where folks can’t access care because we don’t have enough folks to be at the bedside.”

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