The share of registered nurses planning to retire within a year jumped to 27 percent in 2017, up from 16 percent two years earlier. That is the headline number from the AMN Healthcare 2017 Survey of Registered Nurses, and the staffing firm read it as proof that the long-predicted wave of Baby-Boomer retirements in nursing had already begun.
The timetable is also shortening. Among Baby-Boomer nurses who plan to retire, 73 percent said they would go within three years or less. Fewer respondents said they would stay four years or more.
What other data shows
Research from the Center for Interdisciplinary Health Workforce Studies puts hard numbers on the exits. Baby-Boomer RNs peaked at 1.26 million in 2008. Since 2012, roughly 60,000 a year have left the workforce, and the pace is rising. By 2020, the center expects the group to be about half its 2008 size.
Demand is moving the other way. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics, in its 2016-2026 projections, said healthcare would soon become the country’s largest employer. It forecast an average of 624,000 job openings a year for healthcare practitioners and technical occupations, plus another 635,000 a year in healthcare support jobs. Nurses alone account for an average of 204,000 openings a year.
Nurses on the front line already feel the squeeze. In the AMN survey, 48 percent said shortages had worsened over the past five years, up from 37 percent in 2015. Only 22 percent said they had not, down from 34 percent. Some respondents wrote that thin staffing can hurt the quality of patient care.
AMN described the shortage as a “perfect storm”: retirements arriving just as an aging population needs more care. The company said the departures will drain clinical expertise and institutional knowledge from hospitals and other providers, and called its findings “a wake-up call” for an industry that will need new ways to cope.
