Health care isn’t working for clinicians anymore. Here’s where they’re going

Kelsey Fassold ’s career in nursing would never be the same.??

When the pandemic barreled down on St. Louis in 2020, Fassold was pulled from her role as a neurosurgery intensive care nurse to work in a COVID-19 unit. The work felt meaningful— at first.?

“You’re standing up to help your community at all costs,” she said. “But we didn’t think it would drag on for this long.”?

?Fassold soon joined several of her colleagues and signed a lucrative travel nurse contract. The money was enticing — “once in a lifetime,” she called it — especially when her own hospital had halted raises and cut benefits like 401k matching. ?

“It was going to be life-changing for my son and I,” she said. “But I really ran myself ragged.”?

Working as a travel nurse didn’t prevent the panic she began to feel before each shift, or the nightmares that followed when she returned home. “[We] did everything we could to save these people, only to take them to the morgue,” she said. “It feels like you’re being told, ‘It’s your fault.’”?

Now she’s looking to change roles entirely.?

Two years into the pandemic, health care workers are exhausted and fed up. Headlines abound about clinicians leaving the field. LinkedIn data bears this out: The number of health care professionals who made a job transition last year was up 34% in the United States compared with 2019, and 49% higher in Canada. We define a job transition as a change in job title to an entirely new role.?

These figures are likely an underestimate of the movement happening in health care. Our data didn’t include professionals who left the workforce entirely. It also didn’t include those who changed roles but kept the same title.?

Certainly burnout — both the unceasing workload and the emotional toll that covid has wreaked — is a big part of the story. But in conversations with health care professionals, other themes emerged. ?

Some clinicians saw the pandemic as a time to reflect on what they really wanted out of their careers. Others decided that they wanted to take part in the monumental shifts that the industry is undergoing, instead of continuing down their set path in health care. While the details of their career moves are unique, their stories share a common thread: Health care isn’t working for many professionals, and the pandemic only added fuel to this fire.??

Spread thin and ready to change

When LinkedIn’s data science team dove into the numbers, one clear theme emerged: Pharmacists are making moves.?

Among the six job titles we looked at — including doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, pharmacy technicians and mental health professionals — pharmacists made more job transitions than any other group.??

And they did so with fewer years of experience compared to pharmacists who made career changes in 2019.

In the U.S., the number of pharmacists who made a career transition between 2019 and 2021 increased 47.3% — while in Canada, transitions were up 66.7% over pre-pandemic numbers.?

Gina Sirco understands why. Prior to the pandemic, she had spent her entire career at CVS, where she started as an intern 23 years ago.?

Initially, she thrived off of the fast pace of her Boston-area location. But eventually burnout started to seep in. There were long hours, staffing shortages and no dedicated breaks. These issues pre-dated the pandemic — but then the covid vaccines were approved.??

“There was a constant demand for vaccinations, but we weren’t getting help with other aspects of the pharmacy job,” Sirco said. The pharmacy’s three or four employees were suddenly responsible not only for filling prescriptions, counseling patients and performing administrative tasks — they were also standing on the frontlines of the country’s ambitious vaccine rollout. ?

“Sometimes you might see half as many [employees helping customers] as you’d see in your local coffee shop,” she said.

Sirco had enough. She took a job as a pharmacist at PharmaCann, a medical marijuana dispensary, where she counsels patients and makes sure they meet New York’s eligibility requirements for medical cannabis use. “The culture is better,” she said. “The people I work with aren’t spread as thin.”?

(CVS declined to comment for this story.)?

Nurses experienced almost as many transitions as pharmacists, with job changes increasing 47% in the U.S. and 62% in Canada between 2019 and 2021. Women outpaced men in making major job moves. Job transitions in the U.S. increased 37% among women compared with 28% for men during this period.

The challenges of the pandemic have hit women, and especially women of color, particularly hard, said Dr. Omolara Thomas Uwemedimo , founder of Melanin & Medicine, a group that helps health care organizations build out their equity initiatives. ??

Eight out of 10 Black women are the breadwinners or co-breadwinners in their families, she said, and they’ve been balancing childcare, eldercare and their careers, sometimes without a partner. Moreover, many have seen the pandemic devastate their communities, and felt the helplessness of being on the frontlines.?

“Those statistics have been very grim for people of color,” Owemedimo said, adding that health care professionals have started to wonder whether their efforts are translating into better outcomes. “A lot of women are recognizing that they’ve done this work for quite some time and they want to make a greater impact.”

Wanting more out of work

Each time Dr. Pooja Aysola knocks on a patient’s door in her Boston emergency department, it’s a signal to herself as well. While it’s easy to get lost in the sheer numbers of the pandemic — the people filling emergency departments, the ones who end up on a ventilator, the ones who never make it home — the knock reminds her that each patient deserves empathy.??

There’s a different feeling in hospitals these days. Now that there’s a way for people to protect themselves against severe disease, more than half of clinicians admit that they’ve struggled to find empathy for the vaccine refusers who end up in the hospital. ?

“I had patients with covid who just didn’t believe me” that they had it, Aysola said.

While empathy fatigue may be rampant, LinkedIn data found that 45% of clinicians who made a career transition last year remained in the health care industry. That includes Aysola, who last June accepted a position as senior director of clinical operations at Wheel, a company that provides resources for virtual care, and who still practices medicine.?

In Canada, only a third of clinicians stayed within the health care industry. But like in the U.S., many professionals who didn’t moved between health care and retail, which includes retail pharmacies. ?

Tellingly, the data suggests that many of the U.S. pharmacists who changed jobs left for a competitor. The top four companies that saw the most churn (that is, they had the largest number of employees who left and the largest number of employees who joined in the past year) were all large retail pharmacies, suggesting a heated talent war.

In Canada, the story was a bit different. The top four companies that lost employees were retail pharmacies, but health systems were the beneficiaries of the talent flow.?

A quest for talent?

Walgreens, the largest pharmacy chain in the U.S., has been on a rapid hiring spree; the Deerfield, Ill.-based company filled 3,600 jobs in the past month and has 12,000 open positions. Many of the roles are new, created both to meet the demand for covid testing and vaccinations as well as to provide more options for pharmacists who want flexible work arrangements.??

Walgreens’ competitors are also vying to fill positions. The number of job openings for pharmacists — as a share of all postings on LinkedIn — increased 293% in the U.S. and 374% in Canada between 2019 and 2021. ?

There were similar spikes in openings for pharmacy technicians, particularly in the U.S., where they jumped 350%. ?

Walgreens has made several changes to attract candidates. The company centralized some of its services to take the pressure off individual stores. And it created roles that can be performed remotely, like health outcomes pharmacist, which involves counseling patients who may need additional support complying with their treatments.??

The company is also investing in its digital capabilities, said Rina Shah , group vice president of pharmacy operations and services. It’s using artificial intelligence to send additional support to stores during peak hours as well as building customer-facing tools like online scheduling.??

Yet despite the high demand for pharmacists, PharmaCann pharmacist Sirco said she found the job market as competitive as ever, with the most desirable openings receiving hundreds of applicants, sometimes within hours.??

Pharmacy chains and health systems posted the largest percentage of U.S. health care jobs last year on LinkedIn. But one of the biggest U.S. hirers by volume was a staffing agency that connects clinicians to travel positions — underlining evidence that hospitals have relied on outside firms to meet their staffing needs. ?

Notably, job postings for physicians, as a share of all openings on LinkedIn, declined by nearly a quarter in the U.S. and Canada when compared to 2019 levels. Hospitals enacted hiring freezes during the early months of pandemic and have been slow to bring back doctors. ?

Finding a fresh start, in a familiar field?

For nurse Stephen Dameron , the pandemic offered a career wakeup call. In June 2020, Dameron was deployed to the Navajo Nation as part of his work with the U.S. government’s National Disaster Medical System. A covid exposure landed him in quarantine for 14 days, giving him time to think about starting his own business.?

Dameron wanted to tackle a fundamental problem in health care: how it’s paid for. He cited data showing that as many as 25% of medical claims are denied, amounting to as much as $260 million. ?

His company, EPL Innovative Solutions, uses artificial intelligence to review claims for errors before they’re submitted, with another layer of human review for claims that are flagged.?

For clinicians who left health care, the most common industries they’ve joined include education (2.6%), corporate services (2.2%) and software & IT services (1.5%.) In Canada, clinicians transitioned into education (3.3%) and public administration (1.9%.)?

The problems with the U.S. health care system had been evident to Dameron since he was in nursing school. But the pandemic, he said, “pushed it over the edge.”?

“I can’t tell you I’m burnt out from covid,” he said. “I’m burnt out from the system.”??

Fassold, the covid ICU nurse, left travel nursing abruptly one day, no longer able to muscle through her post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s the first time in her life she’s been unemployed, and she’s taking time to heal and regroup.?

She’s considering becoming a transplant coordinator, a role that would allow her to work regular business hours and take a break from bedside nursing.??

There’s another benefit too, she said: “It’s also dealing with life instead of death, for once.”

Methodology

The LinkedIn Economic Graph Research and Insights team analyzed thousands of LinkedIn profiles of health care professionals from the U.S. and Canada to understand how job transitions and postings were trending in the health care industry over the length of the pandemic so far?(between 2019 and 2021). A job transition is defined as a change in job title to an entirely new role. The data excludes LinkedIn members who left one job but did not start another and professionals who left health care but kept the same job title and/or function.?Paid job postings on LinkedIn were analyzed for several different health care roles. Year-over-year changes in postings were calculated by dividing the total number of postings per role by the total number of postings on LinkedIn in the years examined. Gender identity isn’t binary and we recognize that some LinkedIn members identify beyond the traditional gender constructs of “male” and “female.” If not explicitly self-identified, we have inferred the gender of members included in this analysis by classifying their first names as either male or female or by pronouns used on their LinkedIn profiles. Members whose gender could not be inferred as either male or female were excluded from this analysis.??