National Nurses Month is underway, offering an important opportunity to reflect on the challenges and opportunities facing today’s nursing workforce. In this Q&A Jill Warren, senior vice president of clinical operations and global clinical governance at Sagility, shares insights on the top issues impacting nurses in 2025 – from burnout and staffing shortages to the role of technology – and explores what healthcare organizations can do to support and retain this essential part of the care team.
With National Nurses Month approaching, what are the top three issues impacting nurses today?
Nurses face many issues today. When I think of the top three, here’s what I read, see, hear, and experience in the market.
1. Burnout persists. Unfortunately, the impact of COVID-19 is still with us. For those nurses who were really engaged in clinical practice during the pandemic, the aftereffects of COVID-19 continue to drive an even higher amount of burnout, causing nurses to leave the profession.
2. Working conditions. As leaders, we need to monitor the impact of work/life balance to prevent burnout. Many nurses are called in to work even on their days off because of the nursing shortage, which in turn drives even more burnout. Nurses are moving out of the field entirely or retiring early, which results in even more shortages.
3. Tech innovations. Digital advancements are also impacting nurses today. As technology becomes more entangled in healthcare, more mature nurses will have to adjust how they practice nursing and deal with all the modernizations, including AI, telehealth, and wearable devices.
The National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN) released data revealing that more than 138,000 nurses have left the workforce since 2022, and by 2029, almost 40% of nurses – 1.8 million – intend to leave the workforce. This shift in personnel threatens the national healthcare systems at large, especially as Baby Boomers retire, if solutions are not enacted to address this.
These changes over the last several years will continue to affect nursing in the future.
Is there a nursing shortage in 2025? What’s causing it?
The data show that the shortage will continue for quite some time. When you consider the 1.8 million anticipated to leave the field, it’s a significant problem.
Given the current shortage, how are we going to replace nurses in the future? The downward spiral really accentuates the need for nursing education. But even in nursing education, we have a shortage of highly qualified instructors.
As these people leave, the question is: How will we backfill and train the numbers necessary to overcome the shortage?
The shortage becomes more acute as we all live longer, suffer from chronic conditions, and need more care at home or in facilities.
It’s a Catch-22. The demand for nurses continues to grow, but the supply struggles to keep up.
What can be done to ease the shortage in 2025? And in the future?
We have to support nursing education and invest in nursing faculty so that we can enroll the number of nurses needed in the future. Focusing on the higher education system is the foundation for helping us overcome the nursing shortage.
How can recruitment and retention strategies improve nursing as a career?
It really comes down to training, education, wages, and benefits.
Lifelong learning is really, really important to nurses. Sagility’ staff wants continued training and to grow professionally. Motivation is a very important component relative to recruitment and retention.
Investing in programs that support higher education is imperative; when a nurse has an associate nursing degree, they can take advantage of opportunities to support them in gaining their bachelor masters, and even doctoral degrees.
Employers offering training and education to address the desire for lifelong learning will have an advantage in terms of retention.
Nursing is an extremely competitive market, which has driven up salaries. Wages increased during COVID and have continued to rise, although growth has slowed recently. Companies that want to offer competitive wages must understand that pay is very regional. The Northeast and Northwest have very high salary structures, compared to certain areas of the Midwest and the South.
A benefit structure is also extremely important. Once again, we see this in our own organization, and we’ve taken action to address retention and recruitment issues within Sagility as they relate to the benefit structure, including paid time off.
Schedule flexibility has become an important factor affecting the recruitment and retention of nurses. Does the employer support them when they want to attend their children’s activities? Are they able to volunteer within the community that the employer supports?
In addition, employee mental health and behavioral health support is another key area. This support helps address burnout and the response to stress before it takes hold, while also helping to improve work/life balance.
What’s the future of nursing? How will it be affected by AI or other technologies
AI and other technologies are affecting nursing now and will continue to into the future. Nurses are faced with using technology every day, and this occurrence will continue to expand within healthcare. And that’s a good thing.
However, we do need more training heavily focused on AI and machine learning, for example, because both will change how nurses spend time delivering care.
For many, using these technologies can cause anxiety. But I think it’s important as nurses that we focus on new ways of doing things and embrace these changes.
We need to be less concerned with the thought that AI is going to replace our work and more focused on how AI can support our work in the future.
