Nursing homes have yet to recover from workforce losses experienced during the pandemic still, along with other care settings like intensive behavioral health centers.

Skilled nursing facility employment levels between 2016 and 2024 dropped 7.6% from its predicted level, especially between 2020 and 2023, according to a study published in JAMA this month.

Midway through 2024, it appears the staffing level normalized but was still behind by less than 1%, despite the Covid public health emergency expiring in May 2023. By comparison, employment in physician offices reached full recovery in 2022, researchers said, likely due to a lower risk of Covid in this setting.

Thuy Nguyen, a research assistant professor and health economist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, led research on the study out of University of Michigan, along with co-authors Christopher Whaley of Brown University of Public Health, Kosali Simon of the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, and Jonathan Cantor of RAND.

Nguyen’s earlier study in 2023 showed that long-term care facilities were operating with staffing levels more than 10% below prepandemic numbers.

“Health care employment growth decreased amid the pandemic but fully recovered by 2024,” Nguyen and the other researchers said of health care overall. “This recovery contrasts with non–health care employment trends and may result from health care financing via insurance coverage shielding health care employment from macroeconomic fluctuations.”

Future research is needed to better understand the mechanisms for varying employment recovery patterns among health care settings, they said, as well as workforce impact on health care delivery and outcomes.