Worcester Business Journal

14 Worcester Business Journal | November 14, 2022 | wbjournal.com H E A LT H C A R E FOCUS U.S. quit rates Employees leaving their jobs at higher rates than typical has been an ongoing trend for more than a year. Industry Quit rate in Sept. 2021 Quit rate in Sept. 2022 Leisure & hospitality 5.7 5.3 Professional services 3.5 3.2 Health care 2.8 2.5 Real estate 1.4 2.4 Construction 2.5 2.0 Manufacturing 2.5 1.9 Finance & insurance 1.8 1.5 Education 1.6 1.4 U.S. average 2.9 2.7 Note: The quits rate is the number of quits during the entire month as a percent of total employment. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics BY KEVIN KOCZWARA WBJ Staff Writer T he emergency room at UMass Memorial Medical Center's University Campus in Worcester strains under the pressure on a Friday evening in late October. People wait to check-in, a line forms along one wall as they wait to go through the metal detec- tor for an initial assessment. One nurse can be heard talking about how he has a place to live, even a mortgage, but he barely knows what it looks like because he's never home. According to the U.S. Bureau Of Labor Statistics, 527,000 U.S. healthcare workers quit their jobs in August and preliminary numbers for September show another 521,000 workers quit. e trend is marginally down since Septem- ber 2021 when 575,000 workers le their Fighting burnout Healthcare providers have faced a brutal three years and are leaving their jobs in droves jobs. e troubles, though, date back to 2019, even before the COVID pandemic, when the Association of American Med- ical Colleges reported hospitals in the country were understaffed by as many as 20,000 doctors. Incredible Health, a San Francisco-based healthcare hiring agen- cy, said 34% of nurses plan to leave their current position by the end of 2022. "We went into the pandemic behind the 8 ball and didn't have enough nurses or help," said Colleen Wolfe, a nurse in the surgical acute care unit at UMass Memorial Medical Center's Memorial Campus, who has been with the hospital since 1996. "When all hell broke loose in the pandemic, we lost our teams, and teams gave us hope." e number of U.S. workers reporting feeling burned out very oen or always went above 30% in February for the first time since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a survey from Washington, D.C. data firm Gallup. But numbers are higher among healthcare workers, who toil in a system where hospital workers from doctors to nurses to custodians and everyone in between have been put under enormous pressure and decided to call it quits. Susceptible to burnout In a lot of jobs, people can check out aer work. ey don't need to keep up on all the latest news once their hours are completed. But, for people in health care, the world of keeping people healthy and safe as well as the technolo- gy used to do that, never stops evolving. To keep up to date on all of that requires physicians and nurses stay on top of medicine outside of work. And that can weigh on the people trying to keep everyone else safe. In November 2021, Dr. Victor Dzau, president of the National Academy of Medicine and the former president and PHOTO | WBJ FILE More than 500,000 healthcare workers are quitting their jobs monthly in the U.S.

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