In 2021, the Project on Workforce published a report, COVID-19 and the Changing Massachusetts Healthcare Workforce, that evaluated the changes, challenges, and innovations to the Massachusetts healthcare labor market induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyzed data from the spring and summer of 2020 to understand how trends in Massachusetts were impacted across three occupational categories: nursing, direct care, and behavioral health. These roles were selected for focus because they had been identified as priority occupations by the Massachusetts Healthcare Collaborative.
In this blog series, we revisit these three priority occupations to understand how supply and demand trends changed in the months and years following the pandemic’s first wave. We address these key questions:
How has supply and demand changed for nursing, direct care, and behavioral health roles since the onset of the pandemic, both nationally and in Massachusetts?
How have states attempted to address supply challenges? What are models from across other parts of the country?
Click on the links below to explore answers to these questions.
