The effects of the pandemic-era nursing shortage continue to reverberate across New York’s workforce pipeline.
Graduation rates among registered nurses declined slightly between 2021 and 2023 even as applications to degree programs ticked upward, according to new data from the Center for Healthcare Workforce Studies at SUNY Albany. The data, collected through surveys with education programs across the state, could portend a rocky road for the effort to restore New York’s decimated nurse workforce.
New RN graduations dropped 4% between 2021 and 2023, with the biggest drop-offs on Long Island, Central New York and the city, the data showed. The dip occurred despite a higher percentage of nursing school deans reporting increases in the number of applications and acceptances.
More data is needed to determine what caused the drop in graduations, but anecdotal evidence points to the mass disruption to traditional education programs caused by the pandemic, said Dr. Robert Martiniano, a SUNY Albany researcher and co-author of the report. Those were even more pronounced for nursing programs, many of which lost access to the clinical settings where nurses could gain experience as hospitals shifted resources to address Covid-19, he said.
There is also evidence that the pipeline may continue to be hampered by another bottleneck: a shortage of nurse faculty. One out of 9 full-time nurse faculty positions were vacant in 2023.
The faculty shortage could be twofold: the field has seen a wave of recent retirements, and faculty salaries are not as competitive as salaries for nurses in hospital management or at the bedside, according to Martiniano.
That could make it harder to increase the nurse workforce down the road, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars Gov. Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers are pouring into health care workforce development. In August, Hochul announced a $646 million health care workforce investment through a Medicaid pilot program known as the 1115 waiver, the largest of several allocations she has made since taking office. Some state and federal funding exists specifically for faculty scholarships, but those could take years before the state sees an increase in the number of teaching nurses, according to Martiniano.
