A National Strategy To End The Health Care Workforce Pipeline Crisis
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.