If you work in healthcare, you do not need another report to tell you there is a staffing shortage - you have been living it for years. The warning signs go back more than a decade, when retirement began to outpace new nurse graduates. COVID didn’t create the crisis - it exposed it, accelerating burnout, turnover and an exodus from the profession that hospitals are still feeling today.
Now, the underlying numbers simply confirm what every hospital leader and HR director already knows. In 2024, Registered Nurse turnover averaged 16.4%, and nearly one in ten nursing positions went unfilled. The Health Resources and Services Administration projects that by 2037, the U.S will be short over 200,000 RNs and 300,000 LPNs.
Behind every statistics are real people - the nurse picking up extra shifts, the tech covering double duty, and the patients waiting longer for care. The workforce is stretched thin, and the traditional education pipeline just can’t keep up. That’s why more healthcare organizations are beginning to look inward - using apprenticeships to build their own pipeline of skilled, loyal employees and create a more sustainable future for care.
Why Is There a Shortage of Healthcare Workers?
The shortage of healthcare workers in the United States is the result of several overlapping problems that have been building for more than a decade. Hospitals and clinics are struggling to find and keep qualified staff, not because people don’t want to work in healthcare, but because the system can’t train, retain, or replace them fast enough.
An Aging Workforce is Retiring Faster That It Can Be Replaced
The healthcare workforce is aging. More than one million Registered Nurses are expected to retire by 2030, along with thousands of experienced clinicians and technicians. As older professionals leave, hospitals lose both capacity and institutional knowledge. This creates an ongoing healthcare staffing shortage that is especially hard to fill in specialized and leadership roles.
Education Programs Can’t Keep Up With Demand
There’s no shortage of interest in healthcare careers — but there is a shortage of training capacity. In 2023, U.S. nursing schools turned away over 65,000 qualified applicants because they lacked faculty, funding, and clinical placement sites. This educational bottleneck limits how many new nurses, medical assistants, and technicians can enter the field each year, making the workforce shortage in healthcare a structural problem, not just a temporary one.
Burnout and Turnover Are Driving Workers Away
Chronic understaffing has created a cycle of burnout. Nearly 40% of nurses plan to leave their current role by 2029, citing exhaustion, stress, and limited support. Every departure increases workloads for those who remain, leading to more turnover - a self-reinforcing pattern that fuels the shortage of healthcare workers across hospitals, clinics, and long-term care facilities.
Rural Areas Face Even Greater Shortages
The shortage of healthcare workers in rural areas is particularly severe. According to the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis, non-metropolitan regions are projected to face a 24% shortage of Registered Nurses by 2027, compared to just 7% in urban areas. Rural hospitals are often unable to compete with larger systems on pay and benefits, forcing some to cut services or close entirely.
A Hidden Workforce Remains Untapped
Today, more than 700,000 licensed nurses are not actively practicing. Many have shifted to administrative work or left the field altogether. Re-engaging this hidden workforce through flexible roles, mentorship, or return-to-practice programs could immediately reduce the healthcare labor shortage without waiting years for new graduates to enter the field.
The shortage of healthcare workers isn’t caused by a lack of interest — it’s the result of an aging workforce, limited training capacity, widespread burnout, and uneven access to care. Solving it will require rethinking how the healthcare system trains, supports, and retains talent at every level.
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The shortage of healthcare workers isn’t caused by a lack of interest — it’s the result of an aging workforce, limited training capacity, widespread burnout, and uneven access to care.
Healthcare Staffing Shortages Go Beyond Nurses
When most people talk about the shortage of staff in hospitals, they think of nurses — and for good reason. But in conversations with hospital leaders, it’s clear the pressure goes far deeper. Radiology teams, labs, surgical departments, and respiratory therapy units are all feeling the strain. The healthcare staffing shortage is touching every corner of the care continuum, and it’s quietly slowing the system down.
Every department leader tells a version of the same story: open positions they can’t fill, overworked teams doing the jobs of two people, and growing delays in patient care. These gaps may not make headlines, but they’re creating daily operational bottlenecks across hospitals and clinics nationwide.
- Diagnostic Imaging: The 2025 Radiologic Sciences Staffing and Workplace Survey published by the American Society of Radiologic Technologists (ASRT) found that vacancy rates have reached 19.4% for CT technologists and 17.4% for MRI technologists, leading to longer waits for scans and delayed diagnoses.
- Laboratories: A Lighthouse survey of more than 1,100 lab professionals, 73% said their labs were understaffed, and one in three reported being significantly short on staff. It’s a cycle that feeds on itself — too few workers mean longer hours and higher stress, which drives even more people to leave the field entirely.
- Respiratory and Surgical Teams: Shortages across both roles are creating surgical backlogs, canceled cases, and heavier workloads for the staff who remain.
The reality is simple: healthcare staffing shortages aren’t limited to nursing. They’re woven through every department that touches patient care. When any one of those links breaks, the whole system slows down. Solving the workforce crisis means expanding the conversation — and the solutions — beyond the bedside.
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The reality is simple: healthcare staffing shortages aren’t limited to nursing. They’re woven through every department that touches patient care. When any one of those links breaks, the whole system slows down.
The Cost of Healthcare Staffing Shortages
Every hospital leader I talk to knows the math doesn’t work anymore. The healthcare staffing shortage isn’t just about open positions — it’s about what those vacancies cost, both financially and clinically.
The numbers tell the story clearly: replacing a single Registered Nurse now costs an average of $61,000, leading to $4–$6 million in annual turnover losses for the average hospital. To fill the gap, many systems rely on contract labor, with travel nurses making up nearly 40% of total nurse labor costs during peak staffing shortages. It keeps doors open, but it’s not sustainable.
At the same time, hospitals are being squeezed on reimbursement. Medicare pays only $0.83 for every dollar of care, leaving limited room to invest in retention or workforce development programs that could fix the root problem.
The human toll is just as alarming. Studies show that each additional patient per nurse increases the risk of death by 7%, and 81% of hospital leaders report care delays directly caused by staffing shortages. These aren’t abstract numbers — they’re the daily realities patients and providers feel when teams are stretched too thin.
The bottom line: the shortage of staff in hospitals has become both a financial hemorrhage and a patient-safety crisis. Every month of inaction compounds the cost — in budgets, morale, and outcomes.
How to Fix Staffing Shortages in Healthcare
When I talk with hospitals and health systems, there’s a clear pattern — everyone’s trying to solve the healthcare staffing shortage, but they’re running up against the same wall. Nursing schools can’t expand fast enough, allied health programs are full, and recruiting from the same shrinking talent pool isn’t working.
The systems that are making real progress aren’t waiting for the education pipeline to catch up — they’re building their own. Employer-led Registered Apprenticeships are helping healthcare organizations create paid, hands-on training programs that develop talent faster and keep it longer. For a deeper look at how registered apprenticeships are transforming healthcare workforce pipelines, read Registered Apprenticeships: A Proven Workforce Solution for Hospitals and Healthcare Systems
It’s a simple but powerful shift: instead of competing for limited talent, employers grow it from within.
Why Apprenticeships Work To Fix Staffing Shortages in Healthcare
- They make healthcare careers accessible. Apprentices earn a paycheck while they learn, removing the financial barriers that keep many people out of the field.
- They’re built around employer needs. Training happens in your environment, aligned with your systems, standards, and staffing goals.
- They improve retention. Apprentices and mentors both stay longer because there’s a sense of investment and belonging from day one.
- They deliver value immediately. Apprentices start contributing to care delivery while they’re still training — helping ease workload pressure across departments.
What We’ve Learned at ApprentiScope
In working with healthcare organizations exploring apprenticeship programs, several themes come up again and again:
- Reduced reliance on contract labor. Apprenticeships help employers build their own pipeline instead of competing for the same small pool of licensed workers.
- Local talent stays longer. Recruiting and training from the surrounding community creates a workforce that’s more rooted and loyal.
- Immediate workforce impact. Apprentices start contributing while they’re training — reducing the lag time between hire and productivity.
- Stronger cultural alignment. When employees are trained within the organization, they absorb its values, expectations, and standards from day one.
- Less retraining, more readiness. Because apprentices learn on the job, they enter the workforce prepared for your systems and patient care environment.
Across every conversation, one thing stands out: apprenticeships aren’t a quick fix. Apprenticeships in healthcare are a long-term strategy for building a stable, skilled, and values-aligned workforce. Hospitals that start small, prove the model, and scale from there are finding they can fill roles faster, improve retention, and strengthen their culture in the process.
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Apprenticeships aren’t a quick fix. Apprenticeships in healthcare are a long-term strategy for building a stable, skilled, and values-aligned workforce.
Turning the Healthcare Staffing Crisis Into a Sustainable Workforce Strategy
Most hospitals have been operating in crisis mode for years — filling shifts, plugging gaps, and doing whatever it takes to keep care running. But at some point, the cycle of reaction has to stop. The next step is building a workforce strategy that doesn’t just respond to shortages but prevents them.
That’s where apprenticeships come in. By creating structured, local training pipelines, healthcare organizations can:
- Improve retention and engagement by showing employees a clear path to growth.
- Reduce contract labor dependency and strengthen in-house teams.
- Fill hard-to-hire roles faster by developing talent tailored to their own systems and standards.
When employers take ownership of workforce development, they move from crisis response to control — building consistency, loyalty, and trust along the way.
Because if the health of our communities depends on the strength of our workforce, then building that workforce must begin inside the healthcare system itself.
Start Building a Workforce That Lasts
Every healthcare organization is feeling the impact of staffing shortages — but not every organization is taking the same approach. The ones moving forward are investing in long-term workforce strategies like registered apprenticeships.
If you’re still exploring what an apprenticeship model could look like for your organization, start with our Registered Apprenticeship Guide — it breaks down how these programs work, how they’re funded, and why they’re one of the most effective ways to rebuild healthcare’s workforce pipeline.
Already know apprenticeships are the right fit and want to see how to implement them? Request a Demo to see how ApprentiScope helps hospitals and healthcare systems launch, manage, and scale programs with ease.
Because solving the healthcare staffing crisis isn’t about working harder — it’s about building smarter, together.
