We must solve Virginia’s other health care workforce crisis: A lack of educators

America’s health care workforce shortage is a known crisis: Over85% of health care facilitieslack adequate staff. However, the shortage of health careeducatorsis often overlooked. It will be impossible to ramp up enrollment and prepare an adequate number of students to fill these gaps until we fill the thousands of faculty chairs sitting empty in Virginia and across the country .

Even before I got my degree, I began my health career as an emergency medical technician. Eventually, I worked to become a nurse, an educator, and a hospital and nursing school leader. In each of these roles, I’ve seen how our shortage of health care educators directly impacts our ability to sustain the workforce and care for patients.

In a vicious cycle, the lack of educators limits the number of interested and qualified students a school or program can accept. In nursing, surveys by theVirginia Department of Health Professionsand theAmerican Association of Colleges of Nursingfound a lack of sufficient faculty as one of the main reasons tens of thousands of qualified candidates were not admitted to nursing programs. In the Career and Technical Education (CTE) field, which is vital to certifying allied health professionals like medical assistants,71% of CTE program directorsreport a shortage of health sciences teachers and high faculty turnover due to factors like working in high-growth, hard-to-staff fields and opportunities to earn more in non-teaching employment.

This is causing a net reduction in the number of students participating in health science coursework. Virginia’s Department of Education lists career and technical educators in itstop 10 listof critical teacher shortages in the state and expects the shortage to worsen over the next five years. As a result of fewer qualified students participating in health science education, the talent pool of future medical professionals and educators is shrinking.

Demand for critical healthcare professionals, including medical assistants, home health aides and nursing assistants, will surpass 10 million as soon as 2026, according toone study. But if current trends hold, 6.5 million individuals will permanently leave these jobs while only 1.9 million will replace them. We’re seeing similar shortages in other health roles:42% of employerssay it’s difficult to find qualified pharmacy technicians and the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics projects a need forover 197,000 additional registered nurses. Virginia alone will need4,190 additional nurses each yearfor the next five years to meet that demand.

If we hope to solve this crisis, we must lean into innovation to better support and grow the health care educator workforce. We can do this by shifting our focus to better develop and support the individuals charged with preparing the next generation of medical professionals.

A key reason behind the growing shortage of healthcare educators is that most practitioners rarely consider entering academia as an advancement opportunity for their careers. There are too few resources — grants, scholarships, training opportunities, and competitive salaries — available to recruit and support practitioners’ transition from clinician to educator.

Once in the academic workforce, we also need to provide better resources to support those educators. Many faculty are overwhelmed and burned out – some are retiring early, andone reportestimates that nearly one-third of current nursing faculty are expected to retire by next year. If we hope to retain these educators, we must invest in innovative methods like clinical simulation and educational technology tools that help digital-native students better learn and remediate skills while lessening the work burden on faculty.

Policymakers must also support efforts to help recruit and retain educators, and grant programs must take a more holistic approach to help support health care academia. While some have proposed grant programs to help close the pay gap between clinical nursing and nurse faculty roles, let’s think beyond just nursing. Legislation should also aim to combat the shortage of health care educators in other settings like CTE high school programs, adult career centers, and community colleges, which would expand allied health career training opportunities.

I commend Virginia lawmakers for taking an interest in addressing the growing shortage of CTE educators through bipartisan legislation likeSenate Bill 879andHouse Bill 2018, which were considered this past session. It’s important that lawmakers recognize this crisis, and I urge them to continue pursuing efforts to solve it.

But lawmakers should also consider legislation that helps bolster the productivity and capacity of educators. We cannot recruit our way out of this shortage – we need to provide current educators with the support they need to effectively and efficiently teach more students without feeling overwhelmed.

I, like many others, felt a calling to become a health care professional and have had an extremely rewarding career caring for patients and teaching students. With so many passionate students eager to begin their own health care career journey, we must do everything we can to ensure we have the faculty to teach them.