Abstract
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), as of June 2022, hospitals are down 65,000 employees from February 2020. NAVIGATING THE CHALLENGES To address the magnitude of this problem, the AHA Board of Trustees' Task Force on Workforce and the International Association for Healthcare Security & Safety developed a report titled Creating Safer Workplaces: A Guide to Mitigating Violence in Health Care Settings (www.aha.org/workplace-violence). Aspen Valley Hospital in Colorado provides quiet rooms for staff to use for “time outs” from stressful situations; Hackensack Meridian Health in New Jersey offers educational classes and training on stress management; Cody Regional Health in Wyoming has on-site access to licensed therapists for emotional support; and in Delaware, ChristianaCare's new Center for WorkLife Wellbeing, physicians can share and process traumatic experiences. To this end, we are partnering with a coalition of stakeholders on a workforce agenda focusing on: lifting the cap on Medicare-funded physician residencies, boosting support for nursing schools and faculty, providing scholarships and loan repayment for certain providers, and expediting visas for all foreign highly trained healthcare personnel; supporting efforts to bolster nursing faculty to ensure that hospitals have the nurses they need in the future (schools turned away more than 90,000 qualified applicants from baccalaureate and graduate programs in 2021 alone due to an insufficient number of faculty, clinical sites, and classrooms according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2022); establishing a Rural America Health Corps modeled on the National Health Service Corps to encourage healthcare professionals to serve in rural areas; extending and expanding the Conrad State 30 J-1 visa waiver program, which waives the requirement to return home for a period if physicians holding J-1 visas agree to stay in the United States for 3 years to practice in a federally designated underserved area; encouraging Congress to support bipartisan legislation, such as the SAVE Act, to protect healthcare workers against workplace violence; increasing regulatory oversight of nurse staffing agencies to deal with price gouging and anticompetitive behavior that exploits the pandemic by charging hospitals exorbitant prices for contract workers (legislation pending on Capitol Hill would require an independent review of these practices); supporting states' efforts to expand the scope of practice laws allowing healthcare professionals to practice at the top of their licenses; and stopping health insurers' burdensome practices that take caregivers away from the bedside and increase burnout and turnover. [...]the AHA was proud to support and obtain funding for the new Dr. Lorna Breen Health
