What Healthcare Workforce Leaders Told Us in Chicago

Two days in Chicago, one question in every hallway

On October 6-7, more than 100 healthcare leaders filled the Westin Chicago Lombard for the Workforce Management in Hospitals and Healthcare Summit. The agenda covered AI, scheduling, well-being and engagement. The hallway conversations kept circling back to one question: how do we keep the people we already have?

Our very own Altara Weiland took the stage to talk about breaking the hire-and-replace cycle, and some of the best moments came between sessions, when leaders shared the numbers they're carrying into 2027 planning.

While we haven't independently verified every figure we're about to share, we're sharing them as they were shared with us by workforce leaders, because they show what's weighing on their minds right now.

What's on leaders' minds

The figures leaders brought to Chicago fell into three buckets:

1. Demand keeps climbing
2. The pipeline is capped
3. Too many of the people already hired are walking out the door

Demand is outrunning supply

• A projected 4.6M shortage of healthcare support workers by late 2026
• 189K RN openings a year, on average, projected through 2034
• Rural and non-metro regions facing 2-4x the shortage of urban areas by 2038

That last one stuck with us. A national average hides school deserts; hospitals located far from the nearest nursing school.

The pipeline is capped by classrooms

• Over 90K qualified nursing-school applicants turned away in 2025
• A 7.2% faculty vacancy rate, and schools can't train more nurses without instructors
• Waitlists of four classes, or two semesters, for every allied-health program

One leader put it simply: hiring with academia is slow. Faculty, clinical spots, and credentialing bodies all set the pace, and none of them move at a pace that meets hospital needs.

The people you have are leaving

• 524K RNs left their positions in 2025
• 22.7% of newly hired RNs leave within their first year
• A median RN age of 50, up from 46 in 2022

Millennials leave when they can't see a career path or development ahead of them, and knowledge transfer from senior staff is what fills that gap. The catch is the assumption retiring clinicians will be replaced by an equal amount of new talent, but when the top of the funnel isn't being filled at the same pace, that knowledge falls by the wayside.

What we heard on stage

The sessions answered those numbers more directly than we expected. Four themes ran through both days.

Grow your own. If the academic pipeline is capped, build one inside. Children's Hospital of Philadelphia shared how leadership development and structured career paths support a 70%+ internal promotion rate. Cleveland Clinic walked through apprenticeships that open healthcare careers to community members without traditional academic backgrounds. USPI and Stepful showed how to embed certification right into the daily workflow, so new hires earn credentials while they work.

Start earlier. Baptist Health's closing keynote made the case for reaching students in high school and college with internships and clear development maps. Sutter Health led a roundtable on student pathways, and the aging-workforce panel (Sentara, Advocate, NCH and Endeavor) talked about high school partnerships and early outreach to the next generation.

Win the first year. With more than a fifth of new RNs leaving in year one, onboarding got real airtime. Kaiser Permanente focused on structured skill handoffs and coaching for managers. Intermountain Health shared how rebuilding onboarding around peer learning and mentoring cut time to proficiency by 41%. Rady Children's is using storytelling to connect new clinicians to the "why" from day one.

Give time back to the bedside. Sentara's virtual nursing model shifts documentation, education and discharge coordination off bedside teams. HCA showed scheduling tools that let nurses claim open shifts and cut last-minute scrambles. Temple Health and Take2 AI talked about AI agents taking on much of the recruiting process.

Where we land

Retention is where employers have the most direct leverage. They can decide how they spend to bring people in, and whether that spend keeps them. Sign-on bonuses buy a start date, but they don't buy year two. When nearly a quarter of new RNs leave in their first year, a bonus paid up front (and clawed back later) is money spent on a hire you may lose anyway.

The health systems we work with are moving that spend earlier and stretching it out:

• Commit before graduation. Support students while they're still in school, tied to a defined role after they graduate. Loyalty starts before day one.
• Pay as they stay. Student loan repayment pays out over time, so the benefit grows the longer someone stays.
• Meet clinicians where they are. Campus presence, digital channels and an employer brand that converts widen the candidate pool, especially for rural and hard-to-staff roles.

To be clear about scope: early commitment doesn't add a single faculty seat. It does help fill the seats that exist with students who might not otherwise finish, and it connects them to a job before someone else does.

For our partners, that shows up as year-one turnover of about 1 in 20, vs. nearly 1 in 5 industry-wide.