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National Academy for State Health Policy

States are confronting persistent behavioral health workforce shortages, maldistribution, patient access issues, and rising demand for services. To address these challenges, states need workforce information to determine which interventions will have the greatest impact…

…New York offers a different model: using ongoing workforce monitoring and planning infrastructure to build a more continuous picture of workforce supply and demand. The Center for Health Workforce Studies maintains a statewide workforce data system designed to support policymakers and planners by combining primary and secondary data sources. New York is also surveying its public mental health system to build baseline workforce data that can inform future planning tools, including a possible workforce website or public-facing data resource. Early survey efforts generated roughly 2,500 responses, with about 90 percent coming from within the public mental health system rather than from students or trainees.

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Crain’s New York Business

Roughly a dozen facilities in the New York City metropolitan area will receive part of a $32.5 million state fund to boost healthcare workforce training and development…

…The state’s healthcare workforce has grown unevenly since the pandemic, both geographically and by setting, with the city and Long Island seeing major gains over upstate New York and outpatient and home-based care far outpacing hospital staff increases, according to a May report from the Center for Health Workforce Studies at UAlbany.

While the state healthcare workforce has exceeded pre-pandemic levels in recent years, projections for the coming years are less rosy. For example, the state Department of Labor projected an average of 17,000 job postings for registered nurses annually between 2022 and 2032, but nurse graduation rates have remained around 10,000 per year, the report shows.

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Daily Gazette

When Dr. Rob Demuro moved from the small town of Earlville in upstate New York to attend medical school in Buffalo, he always planned on returning to his rural roots…

…But the effort has ultimately fallen flat due to regulatory restrictions and a maldistribution of opportunities, said Robert Martiniano, senior program director for the Center for Health Workforce Studies, a University at Albany research center that examines the health care workforce.

“They continue to struggle with putting physicians in the places that need them the most,” he said.

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Public News Service

A New York nurses union leader says federal immigration policies are crippling New York’s labor force.

New data show the state is losing thousands of workers to the chilling effect of ICE arrests and other enforcement actions, with fewer people to fill those jobs. It is especially problematic for an already strained healthcare sector, which is grappling with the Supreme Court’s decision to remove Temporary Protected Status from Haitian immigrants…

…A University of Albany report found some major challenges for recruitment of nurses are non-competitive salaries and not enough people looking to do the work.

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Health Affairs

The United States does not have two separate health care workforce crises. It has one crisis with two symptoms. The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) projects supply adequacy of physicians at 88 percent and supply adequacy of registered nurses at 94 percent by 2033. Shortages remain particularly acute in non-metro areas and in rural hospitals, safety-net facilities, and long-term care settings. Yet the federal infrastructure for workforce planning for physicians and nurses remains almost entirely separate, preventing the development of a cohesive national strategy or provider pipelines capable of addressing the nation’s broader health care access crisis…

…The nursing bottleneck is primarily an undergraduate problem: too few faculty and too few clinical training sites in some locations and too few applicants in others. During the 2023–24 academic year, nursing schools turned away more than 65,000 qualified applicants. Yet a 2025 analysis of Texas found more than 5,000 unfilled seats across the state’s nursing programs. These geographic differences mean national projections can mask severe regional shortages. And without a national applicant distribution plan, such as a matching program, seats will continue to go unfilled at some schools while applicants are turned away from schools at capacity.

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Finger Lakes 1

A new report from the Center for Health Workforce Studies found that hospitals, clinics, nursing homes and home care agencies across upstate New York still struggle to recruit registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, therapists, primary care physicians and other essential workers. At the same time, the education pipeline is producing fewer nurses in the Finger Lakes and Central New York even as demand is projected to remain high.

The findings are contained in the center’s 2026 report on healthcare workforce supply and demand. The University at Albany-based research center examined employment, salaries, professional licenses, graduations, employer surveys and state labor projections.

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Spectrum News 1

A new report on New York’s healthcare workforce says the state still doesn’t have enough primary care providers, especially in upstate regions, leaving millions of residents with fewer options for routine care and longer waits for appointments.

The report, from the University at Albany’s Center for Health Workforce Studies, finds persistent gaps in primary care across much of New York. Program manager Nafin Harun said nearly 5 million people live in federally designated primary care shortage areas.

“We need just above 1,000 providers to close those shortages,” Harun said, adding that figure is a floor, not a ceiling, for what’s needed.

For patients like Justine Morris, the impact is personal. Morris said not having a primary care provider allowed a misdiagnosis to linger.

“I didn’t know I had cancer for the last seven months. I just found out they didn’t send me the correct report,” Morris said.

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CBS 6 Albany

Healthcare employment in New York grew sharply from 2020 to 2024, but a new report from the University at Albany’s Center for Health Workforce Studies found that most of that growth happened downstate, while many upstate and rural areas saw little change or even declines in key jobs.

The report found a 15% increase in healthcare employment statewide between 2020 and 2024. Nearly all of that growth was concentrated in New York City and on Long Island, where healthcare jobs rose 20%. All other regions of the state combined saw just 3% growth.

Robert Martiniano, a senior program manager with the Center for Health Workforce Studies, said the data show rural areas are being left behind in some sectors. “If you look at all these rural areas, there’s not only not growth, but there’s a decline in home health jobs,” Martiniano said.

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Crain’s New York Business

While New York’s healthcare jobs numbers have bounced back since the pandemic, a growing home care industry in the city and a scarcity of personnel upstate has made the recovery deeply uneven.

Healthcare jobs statewide grew 15% between 2020 and 2024, mostly in New York City and Long Island, according to the latest snapshot from the Center for Health Workforce Studies at UAlbany, part of the SUNY system. Healthcare jobs grew just 3 % outside the city, Nassau and Suffolk counties.

The numbers represent the complexity of rebuilding after the pandemic.

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WAMC North East Public Radio

The Center for Health Workforce Studies (CHWS) was recently featured on WAMC’s The Best of Our Knowledge, where David Armstrong and Leanne Keough discussed findings from a recent nursing faculty study and its implications for the healthcare workforce.