Page 16 - BusinessWest November 10, 2021

WBy Joseph Bednar fession, but looked for a setting where they weren’t
hile workforce shortages in healthcare are not a new story, Spiros Hatiras said, COVID-19 certainly didn’t help the situa-
tion. Far from it.
“We had some challenges even before, but
really, the pandemic has created a sort of crisis situation,” said Hatiras, president and CEO of Holyoke Medical Center and Valley Health Sys- tems, noting that industry estimates peg current healthcare vacancies around a half-million jobs nationally. “There’s a mixture of reasons why they left, and a lot of them had to do with the pandemic.”
“We had some challenges even before, but really, the pandemic has created a sort of crisis situation.”
Essentially, he explained, many nurses and specialists have re-evaluated what they want to do for a living, while others who were close to retirement anyway decided to make that transi- tion earlier than they might have. Others who had been part of a double-income household stayed home with the kids during the pandemic and decided they wanted to continue to do so.
“You have people who got burned out dealing with acute illness and decided to stay in the pro-
16 NOVEMBER 10, 2021
HEALTHCARE
dealing with acute ill- ness,” he went on. “Then you had some people with an existential crisis, saying ‘healthcare is not for me.’ We certainly had some of those. Put it all together, and we had a lot of folks leave the profes- sion on the clinical side.”
Entry-level, non- licensed jobs in health- care, like housekeeping and dietary services, have been a struggle to fill as well, Hatiras said, but nowhere near as difficult as on the clinical side.
Adam Berman also
recognizes that these
issues predate COVID.
Well before the pan-
demic — for several years
before, actually — Ber-
man, president and CEO
of Legacy Lifecare, would
attend trade-association panels and conferences and speak with state and national colleagues, and one topic would always be at the forefront.
“It was always workforce, workforce, work- force,” he said. “This was pre-COVID, and it’s what kept providers up at night.”
However, at Legacy’s two partner companies, JGS Lifecare and Chelsea Jewish Lifecare, Berman agrees with Hatiras that the pandemic took an
Spiros Hatiras says hospitals like Holyoke Medical Center are feeling the bottom-line impact of soaring workforce costs.
already-worrisome problem and worsened it. “When COVID came, many individuals who
may have been considering careers in health- care went for it, but for others, COVID gave them pause. And some people elected to retire earlier than they were otherwise going to. For many peo- ple, there was the calculus of determining wheth- er they’d stay at home taking care of somebody versus re-entering the workforce.
“That’s not just in healthcare; that’s in general,”
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