March 6, 2023 — The impact of long COVID – and its sometimes-disabling symptoms that can persist for more than a year — has worsened health care’s already severe workforce shortage.
Hospitals have turned to training programs, traveling nurses, and emergency room staffing services. While the shortage of clinical workers continues, support workers are also in short supply, with no end in sight.
“Our clinical staff is the front line, but behind them, several layers of people do jobs that allow them to do their jobs,” says Joanne Conroy, MD, president of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, a 400-bed hospital in New Hampshire. “Lab and radiology and support people and IT and facilities and housekeeping … the list goes on and on.”
Long COVID is contributing to the U.S. labor shortage overall, according to research. But with no test for the condition and a wide range of symptoms and severity – and with some workers attributing their symptoms to something else — it’s difficult to get a clear picture of the impacts on the health care system.
Emerging research suggests long COVID is hitting the health care system particularly hard.
The system has lost 20% of its workforce over the course of the pandemic, with hospital understaffing at hospitals resulting in burnout and fatigue among frontline medical professionals, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Other research spotlights the significant impacts on health care workers:
While long COVID brain fog, fatigue, and other symptoms can sometimes last just a few weeks or months, a percentage of those who develop the condition – on or off the job – go on to have chronic, long-lasting, disabling symptoms that may linger for years.
Several recent research studies suggest the impacts of long COVID on health care workers, who interact more closely with COVID patients than others on the job, are greater than other occupations and are likely to have a continuing impact.
About 25% of those filing COVID-related workers compensation claims for lost time at work are health care workers, according to a study from the National Council on Compensation Insurance. That was more than any other industry. At the same time, the study – which included data from nine states – found that worker compensation claims for acute COVID cases dropped from 11% in 2020 to 4% in 2021.
Last year, Katie Bach wrote a study for the Brookings Institution on the impact of long COVID on the labor market. She said in an email that she still thinks it’s a problem for the health care workforce and the workforce in general.
“It is clear that we have a persistent group of long COVID patients who aren’t getting better,” she says.
Hospitals Forced to Adapt
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center is the largest health system — and one of the largest employers — in New Hampshire with 400 beds and 1,000 employees at the flagship hospital and affiliate. Human resource staff here have been tracking COVID-19 infections among employees.
The hospital is treating fewer COVID cases, down from a high of about 500 a month to between 100 and 200 cases month. But at the same time, they are seeing an increase in staff are who calling in sick with a range of COVID-like symptoms or consulting with the occupational medicine department, says Aimee M. Claiborne, the head of human resources for the Dartmouth Health system.
“Some of that might be due to long COVID; some if it might be due to flu or RSV or other viruses,” she says. “We are definitely looking at things like absenteeism and what people are calling in for.”
They are also looking at “presenteeism” – where workers show up when they are not feeling well and they are not as productive, she says.
Those who return to work can access the company’s existing disability programs to get accommodations – allowing people with low energy or fatigue or another disability to, for example, work shorter shifts or from home. Dartmouth-Hitchcock is also building more remote work into its system after trying the approach during the height of the pandemic, Claiborne says.
Ultimately, some workers will not be able to return to work. Those who were infected on the job can also seek workers’ compensation, but coverage varies from employer to employer and state to state.
On the other side of the country, Annette Gillaspie, a nurse in a small Oregon hospital, says she caught COVID – like many other health care workers – early in the pandemic before vaccines were available and protective measure were in place.
She says she still hasn’t fully recovered 3 years later – she still has a cough as well as POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome), a common post-COVID-19 condition of the automatic nervous system that can cause dizziness and fatigue when a sitting person stands up.
But she’s back at work and the hospital has made accommodations for her, like a parking space closer to the building.
She remembers being exposed — she forgot to put on protective glasses. A few days later she was in bed with COVID. She says she never quite recovered. Gillaspie says she sees a lot of other people at work who seem to have some long COVID symptoms.
“Some of them know it’s COVID related,” she says. “They’re doing just like I do — pushing through.”
They do it because they love their work, she says.
Shortages Span the Country
Millions of people are living in what the federal government calls “health practitioner shortage areas” without enough dental, primary, and mental health practitioners. At hospitals, vacancies for nurses and respiratory therapists went up 30% between 2019 and 2020, according to an American Hospital Association (AHA) survey.
Hospitals will need to hire to 124,000 doctors and at least 200,000 nurses per year to meet increased demand and to replace retiring nurses, according to the AHA.
When the pandemic hit, hospitals had to bring expensive traveling nurses in to deal with the shortages driven by wave after wave of COVID surges. But as the AHA notes, the staffing shortfalls in health care existed before the pandemic.
The federal government, states, and health care systems have programs to address the shortage. Some hospitals train their own staff, while others may be looking at expanding the “scope of care” for existing providers, like physician assistants. Still others are looking to support existing staff who may be suffering from burnout and fatigue – and now, long COVID.
Long COVID numbers — like the condition itself — are hard to measure and ever-changing. Between 10% and 11% of those who have had COVID have long COVID, according to the Household Pulse Survey, an ongoing Census Bureau data project.
A doctor in the U.K. recently wrote that she and others initially carried on working, believing they could push through symptoms.
“As a doctor, the system I worked in and the martyr complex instilled by medical culture enabled that view. In medicine, being ill, being human, and looking after ourselves is still too often seen as a kind of failure or weakness,” she wrote anonymously in February in the journal BMJ.
Jeffrey Siegelman, MD, a doctor at Emory University Medical Center in the Atlanta, also wrote a journal article about his experiences with long COVID in 2020 in JAMA. More than 2 years later, he still has long COVID.
He was out of work for 5 months, returned to practice part-time, and was exempt from night work – “a big ask,” he says, for an emergency department doctor.
In general, he feels like the hospital “bent over backwards” to help him get back to work. He is just about to return to work full-time with accommodations.
“I’ve been really lucky in this job,” Siegelman says. “That’s not what most patients with long COVID deal with.”
He led a support group for hospital employees who had long COVID – including clerks, techs, nurses, and doctors. Many people were trying to push through their symptoms to do their jobs, he says. A couple of people who ran through their disability coverage were dismissed.
He acknowledges that as a doctor, he had better disability coverage than others. But with no diagnostic test to confirm long COVID, he’s not exempt from self-doubt and stigma.
Siegelman was one of the doctors who questioned the physiological basis for ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome), a condition that mirrors long COVID and commonly appears in those who have lingering symptoms of an infection. He doesn’t anymore.
Researchers are beginning to link ME/CFS and other long-term problems to COVID and other infections, and research is underway to better understand what is known as post-infection illnesses.
Hospitals are dealing with so much, Siegelman says, that he understands if there’s a hesitancy to acknowledge that people are working at a reduced capacity.
“It’s important for managers in hospitals to talk about this with their employees and allow people to acknowledge if they are taking more time than expected to recover from an illness,” he says.
In medicine, he says, you are expected to show up for work unless you are on a gurney yourself. Now, people are much more open to calling in if they have a fever – a good development, he says.
And while he prepared to return to work, symptoms linger.
“I can’t taste still,” he says. “That’s a pretty constant reminder that there is something real going on here.”
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