Reimagining Enrollment to Fill Critical Gaps in Nursing and Mental Health Careers

Nursing shortages weren’t caused by the pandemic. They weren’t caused by long hours, personal risk, burnout, or exhaustion. Okay—those factors haven’t helped. But analysts have been sounding the alarm since long before 2020.

The actual problem? Bad marketing. The wrong candidates are becoming nurses.

How can we say that? Well, it’s right there in the employment numbers. Almost 50% of nurses leave the profession within five years of starting the job. Analysts noticed this years ago, observing that more people were retiring from nursing than entering the field to replace them.

To truly and effectively fill the gaps, we need to get better at recruitment—especially for niche positions. In this article, we take a look at how communities can help bring new, better-suited candidates into healthcare fields.

Highlight Different Healthcare Careers

Registered nurses are important—but they aren’t the only position that needs filling if we want to close the gap. We also need people pursuing psychiatric roles, administrative jobs, and leadership positions on hospital floors.

If you can find kids who are curious about what you can do with a healthcare administration degree, you’re on the right track.

Not only are these professions in short supply, but they’re also lacking in diversity. Many of these roles are still very monolithic in terms of the racial and social backgrounds of the people entering them.

Why is that a problem—especially in a world where “DEI” has become a controversial term? Because study after study shows that healthcare systems with limited minority representation produce worse patient outcomes than those with diverse staff.

The reason is complex, but experts believe it has a lot to do with something called unconscious bias.

It’s not that white doctors, nurses, and administrators are intentionally mistreating patients from different backgrounds. It’s that they may not fully understand or even recognize the cultural nuances that affect how care is received and delivered.

Hospitals are trying to combat this with sensitivity training and programs designed to promote cultural fluency. That’s a good start—but it doesn’t replace the real need for diverse hiring.

Better marketing can help here, too. How are schools presenting healthcare careers? Do college brochures mostly show white students? Are high school guidance counselors steering primarily white girls toward nursing?

If we change the way we talk about and promote these careers—who they’re for and who can thrive in them—we can attract a broader, more representative pool of candidates. And by doing that, we don’t just fill gaps—we improve care.

Variety Is the Spice of Life

Spotlighting a wide range of healthcare careers doesn’t just benefit individual job seekers—it’s good for entire communities.

On the local level, building a diverse roster of healthcare professionals helps ensure that core competencies are maintained—even in small rural towns or overcrowded urban centers where resources are often stretched razor thin.

Take a rural community grappling with high rates of type 2 diabetes. In many such towns, a single hospital might serve several counties spread across a 50-mile radius. That hospital may have one endocrinologist. Just one. And while she’s qualified to help patients manage their diabetes, her caseload includes people with all sorts of endocrine disorders.

Like most doctors, she probably has five minutes or less to spend with each patient—hardly enough time to coach someone through the lifelong challenges of managing a chronic condition.

So, what’s a small town to do?

Enter the diabetes educator. These are registered nurses who have specialized training in diabetes care. They can walk patients through the day-to-day realities of blood sugar management, diet, lifestyle changes, and medication. They don’t need to go to med school to make an impact—they just need a bachelor’s degree in nursing and a certification.

This one adjustment—adding specialized nurses to the care model—can help eliminate bottlenecks, reduce wait times, and dramatically improve outcomes for patients. And the beauty is that there are dozens of other specializations just like this one, all designed to meet highly specific community health needs.

Doctors are hard to make. Nurses? Well, no one’s saying it’s easy—but it takes a lot less time. By creating a steady pipeline of MDs and RNs with complementary specializations, communities of all shapes and sizes can rise to meet the demands of modern healthcare.

How to Improve Recruitment

Looking for a diverse pool of candidates is great. Spotlighting specialized certifications is also helpful. But there are other barriers—about 100,000 of them. That’s right: student debt.

We live in an age where more and more smart, capable people are deciding that college just isn’t worth their time or money. And can you blame them? Graduates are stepping into adulthood with six figures of debt and limited job prospects.

Communities that want to increase their pipeline of qualified medical professionals need to take advantage of grants and scholarships designed to tackle this exact issue. Many states already have programs in place to offset the cost of training for in-demand fields like nursing, education, and social work.

If you live in a community without this kind of support, start asking questions. Reach out to local politicians and community organizations to see what can be done. It's one thing to tell young people that healthcare careers are important. But if you want them to actually sign up and stay the course, you have to make it accessible.

And the only way to do that at scale is through meaningful, high-quality financial support.

Improving healthcare shortages is not an easy pursuit but it is one for which there is a clear formula for success. Identify great candidates.

Help them see how excellent healthcare careers can be. Remove as many possible obstacles from their path as possible. If we can do that, hospitals all over the country will be well-staffed far into the twenty-first century.