With pandemic fatigue wearing on the nation’s health and mental welfare, many have become desensitized to the troubling statistics that worsen by the day. And while many of us are understandably complacent during the pandemic, that doesn’t mean the staffing shortage and workload crisis currently facing healthcare professionals has gone away.
As lawmakers continue to work on measures for COVID-19 relief, they must provide a targeted, timely, and sensible plan to help doctors and nurses.
There’s an urgency to act. COVID-19 hospitalizations have now reached over 100,000 since the start of December. Previously, during the summer peak, the highest hospitalizations were at 60,000. This spells serious concern for our nation’s overworked hospitals and healthcare workforce.
“Capacity” has been a buzzword in the news media in recent weeks, and for good reason. According to estimates from George Washington University’s State Hospital Workforce Deficit Estimator, by Jan. 10, 2021, 48 states will have hospital staffing shortages in one or more specialties as cases surge. At least 40 states will not have enough ICU doctors to treat COVID-19 patients, and 13 states will have less than half of their nurses left to treat other critically ill patients.
Our first responders have already been spread much too thin, and hospitals have had to turn to dire solutions. Some doctors have had to work shifts stretching to 36 hours. Hospitals in Texas have asked for FEMA to send nurses to offer a modicum of relief for already beleaguered professionals. North Dakota has resorted to allowing healthcare workers who have contracted the virus to continue working in COVID-19 units if they’re asymptomatic, citing an overwhelmed healthcare system. All of this is worrisome, considering the fact that studies have found that even increasing a nurse’s workload by just one patient increases the likelihood of a hospital death by a staggering 7%.
Fortunately, there is a bill working its way through Congress offering an effective remedy.
The bipartisan Healthcare Workforce Resilience Act, introduced by Sens. David Perdue and Dick Durbin, would reallocate unused visas from previous fiscal years to give to highly skilled, foreign-born nurses and doctors, giving them the opportunity to work in our country and help solve this crisis. It would reclaim 25,000 unused visas for nurses and 15,000 unused visas for doctors, exempting these visas from contributing toward any limits or caps on any country of origin. It also ensures the immigrants receiving these visas do not displace U.S. workers and requires the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department to expedite the processing of recovered visas.
While the need for more healthcare staff is especially pressing now, we have long faced a shortage of health professionals. Before the pandemic, researchers at the Association of American Medical Colleges found that America could face a gap of as many as 139,000 physicians by 2033. Shortages of registered nurses have also been a long-running problem, especially in nursing homes, three-fourths of which faced staffing shortages prior to the pandemic. Protecting our healthcare workforce and preventing an even worse shortage will be absolutely paramount as our nation battles this pandemic. These shortages will only worsen even after we put COVID-19 behind us. Congress has the opportunity here to demonstrate it wants to and can deliver for our first responders who are sacrificing everything to save lives.
This bipartisan, commonsense proposal illustrates a rare and effective spirit of collaboration at the federal level that can help ameliorate the current crisis and prevent an even more dire healthcare workforce shortage.
Congress must do everything in its power to pass any innovative solution to the nation’s pressing and complex healthcare crisis. Passing the Healthcare Workforce Resilience Act as part of a federal relief package would prove our representatives’ commitment to serving our first responders and will save countless lives.
Tom Price is a former secretary of Health and Human Services.
