Workforce challenges are among the most difficult threatening health care providers today. Nursing turnover, vacancies, and premium labor use are at their highest peaks in 15 years. Meanwhile, the frontline workforce continues to struggle with the personal and systemic impacts of the pandemic.

But this pain is not felt evenly across health care employers. Many post-acute providers, particularly SNFs, are facing staffing shortages so severe as to be existentially threatening. And perhaps more troubling: these shortages are driven not only by the trauma of the pandemic, but by the many structural workforce challenges present before March of 2020.

This report will explore those long-standing challenges and how they intersected with the pandemic. It will also detail where post-acute leaders have the best opportunity to address them—and chart a course to workforce stability and growth.