Addressing the Nursing Workforce Shortage at HCA Healthcare
Overview
This paper examines the critical nursing workforce shortage affecting HCA Healthcare, the largest for-profit health care system in the US, analyzing the economic factors and organizational impacts of this pressing issue. The analysis addresses multiple causative factors including pandemic-related nurse exodus, workforce aging, limited nursing school capacity, and inadequate retention strategies, while highlighting disproportionate impacts on rural and low-income communities. The paper evaluates how staffing deficits contribute to patient safety risks, nurse burnout, and healthcare disparities, particularly affecting vulnerable populations and communities of color.
What this capstone/coursework covers
- Summary of Economic Issue and Organizational Impact: Establishes HCA Healthcare's scale and the national nursing shortage context, including pandemic-related workforce losses and projected demand for 450,000 additional nurses by 2025
- Effects on HCA Healthcare Facilities: Discusses below-target staffing ratios, increased patient loads, patient safety risks, nurse burnout, and community impacts including emergency care delays
- Socioeconomic and Diversity Disparities: Analyzes uneven shortage impacts across rural and low-income urban markets, vulnerability of communities served, and disparities affecting nurses of color
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Addressing the Nursing Workforce Shortage at HCA Healthcare
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Addressing the Nursing Workforce Shortage at HCA Healthcare
Summary of the Economic Issue and Its Organizational Impact
HCA Healthcare is the largest for-profit health care system in the US, with more than 180 hospitals and 2,300 other health care facilities in 20 states, serving millions of patients annually (HCA Healthcare, 2023). HCA Healthcare’s size makes it at the forefront, and a microcosm, of the national nursing workforce shortage, arguably the most pressing health care economic issue today. As previously assessed, this problem is due to multiple factors: a nurse exodus during the pandemic, an impending retirement of an aging nursing workforce, capped capacity of nursing school graduates, and insufficient retention strategies. The 2022 National Nursing Workforce Survey projected that 100,000 registered nurses (RNs) left the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that nationally, the United States would need an additional 450,000 nurses by 2025 (Smiley et al., 2023). The identified shortage, a critical nursing workforce investment deficit to address the demands of the growing care needs of an ageing population in the United States, has been pronounced at HCA Healthcare with contract labor costs soaring to approximately $2.4 billion in 2022 (more than doubling from pre-pandemic levels) as the company struggled to manage staffing needs via expensive travel and agency nurses.
In HCA Healthcare facilities, the effects of staffing shortages are evident.