Over 500,000 Healthcare Workers Quit In August and Thousands More Go On Strike

• Many healthcare employees are burnt out and going on strike to demand better working conditions.
• There have been at least 35 healthcare worker strikes thus far this year, one tracker found.
• In the meantime, more than half a million healthcare employees quit their jobs in August.

Over 500,000 healthcare workers quit in August, the latest month figures are available for, and more than two dozen strikes among healthcare workers have taken place since the start of the year, based on reports.

A tracker from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations discovered there have been 35 strikes in the Healthcare and Social Assistance industry as of Friday.

Over the past 4 months, thousands of workers at more than two dozen hospitals in California have gone on strike. Earlier this month, nearly 31,000 healthcare employees at Kaiser Permanente voted to authorize a strike over wages.

Nurses at one hospital in Massachusetts have been on strike since March, Masslive reported.

The strikes are occurring during a time of increased demand for patient care and a shortage of employees. Along with the Delta variant, the US can be going through an increase in chronically sick patients who delayed care through the pandemic, Politico reported.

Healthcare employees informed Politico that while they know walking out might garner “scorn” from some, they wished to make use of the attention they’ve received all through the pandemic to demand better conditions.

“We’re drowning here,” Mike Pineda, a senior transport technician at Sutter Delta Medical Center in Antioch, California, informed Politico. “The wear and tear on everybody got to the point where folks became frustrated.”

Jamie Lucas, the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals, informed the outlet that the reasons to strike have always been there however that some healthcare employees, like many other industries demanding better conditions across the country, are realizing they have some leverage.

All through the pandemic, healthcare workers have stated they’re burnt out. In May, Nikki Motta, a travel nurse who spent a year working with COVID-19 patients in understaffed hospitals throughout the East Coast told Insider she was experiencing hair loss from the stress.

Liz Evans, another travel nurse, informed Insider she was taking care of six patients at a time when in normal instances, she might have two at most.

 A March 2021 Trusted Health online survey of over 1,000 travel nurses discovered that nearly half said they had been contemplating leaving the profession. Seven months, later a ShiftMed survey found 49% of US nurses stated they might leave the profession within the next two years. More than 90% of respondents in the ShiftMed survey stated staffing shortages had been negatively impacting them.

Some of the other factors which have pushed healthcare professionals to contemplate leaving include the pandemic, low wages, and an increase in workload.

“I really started looking away from bedside over the last year, because the weight was really heavy of what I was doing, and I did not really feel like I was doing the job that I initially signed up for, which is to help people and make people feel better,” Motta informed Insider in May. “I feel like there are even increasingly more expectations for nurses, and nurses are the type of individuals who want to help and who wish to do what’s asked of them, however I believe that’s being taken advantage of in a lot of ways.”