Cuts to health care threaten an industry that’s already facing a mass exodus

As post-Covid pressures meet policy changes, health-care workers eye the exit.

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More than half of American health-care workers say they plan to leave their jobs by 2026, according to a privately funded Harris Poll survey reported Monday by Reuters. The findings underscore the well-documented reality that hospitals and clinics are straining under turnover, burnout, pay pressures, and an aging patient population — a dynamic that makes staffing shortages the new normal. The Harris Poll data is consistent with other recent studies that find between a third and a half of frontline health-care employees are looking for an exit.

“The pandemic was an accelerant of what was already existing with burnout in health-care workers,” said

Dr. Aditi Nerurkar, MD

, a physician at Harvard Medical School with expertise in stress, resilience, burnout, and mental health. “But there were new, added stressors and challenges during the pandemic, and now we are seeing a confluence of all of these factors. There has been no respite since the pandemic; health-care workers were told to ‘just keep your head down and keep going at all costs.’”

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2023 confirms a growing mental health crisis among health-care workers.

For some, this crisis became a breaking point.