News

Pandemic Anniversary Week

March 15, 2024

Where were you when the ACC tournament was canceled?


As I wrap up week three as director of the NC Center on the Workforce for Health at NC AHEC, I am looking at the calendar and am reminded that this week marked four years since Governor Roy Cooper issued North Carolina’s COVID-19 emergency declaration. Masking outdoors, six-foot spacing, and toilet paper shortages now seem like distant memories. And so does the public’s attention on our healthcare workers.

I remember “Honk for Heroes” campaigns in spring and summer 2020, along with TV profiles on exhausted hospital workers and folks planting signs cheering on frontline workers in their yards. But as the pandemic stretched on, the public consciousness seemed to drift to other things in an understandable desire to get back to some version of “normal.”

If we are to truly honor the sacrifices and immense weight carried by our nurses, doctors, allied health professionals, and other caregivers through the pandemic, we cannot be satisfied with workforce planning just getting back to “normal.”

Our healthcare workforce was stretched dangerously thin before the pandemic. Four years later, many healthcare occupations still have not recovered to pre-pandemic employment levels. None of this is for lack of caring and trying across sectors and industries that touch healthcare. Employers, workers, educators, and policymakers alike are working with passion and purpose to find solutions. But too often those efforts are based on local stories of need and limited by available resources. Shared problems require shared solutions based on data, information, and a common goal.

That is why we are thrilled to see so many health employers and educators across the state contributing data to the Health Talent Alliance, a joint initiative of the Center and the NC Chamber of Commerce Foundation with expertise from the Sheps Center on Health Services Research. The data will provide a common set of information that identifies the clogs and leaks in our talent pipeline and inform local, regional, and state action to unclog the clogs and patch up the leaks.

We need to sustain this work for the long haul. Experts project particularly dire talent shortages in nursing, behavioral health, and direct care over the next decade, as addressed in a report issued jointly by the NC Departments of Health and Human Services and Commerce. As the report reinforces, we need a strategic, persistent, and coordinated effort to buck the trends.

After nearly four years in the NC Pandemic Recovery Office, I am absolutely convinced the effort to support and grow our health workforce will determine the future wellbeing, prosperity, and quality of life for everyone in North Carolina. Now as director of the Center, I am eager to engage stakeholders across the state as we build a collaborative strategy to tackle our urgent and long-term healthcare workforce needs. I hope you’ll join me in this effort by sharing your solutions and how the Center can best elevate, connect, and/or support your work in this space.

Together, we can truly honor the sacrifices and immense weight borne by our caregivers during the pandemic and build the workforce North Carolina needs to be healthy today and stay healthy in the future.