Every so often a study comes along and validates what you already believe to be true.  That just happened to me with a study recently published in the 2007 Seniors Housing & Care Journal, and the results seem absolutely congruent with anecdotal evidence of the same phenomena.

The study says that turnover will remain high (40%) for Nursing Home Administrators (NHAs) nationwide.  More troubling, though, is the observation that an alarmingly high number of NHAs, three in four, are considering leaving the industry.  The chief culprit in this implied lack of job satisfaction is the ever-increasing burden of legal and regulatory pressures as well as corporate pressures for those who work for large chains.  NHAs see their responsibilities and stresses expanding at a rate that tends to overwhelm their ?calling? to their profession and they are upset that their time with residents and families is becoming increasingly limited.

Just today I spoke with a NHA who shared an alarming observation with me.  She graduated from college about 11 years ago and of the 50 or so members of her class who focused on healthcare administration, about 30-35 went into long term care or assisted living.  Of that smaller group, only a handful is still in the industry!  She observed that regulatory pressures were a key ingredient with decreasing job satisfaction for those who left the industry.

What does that mean to us?  For one thing it means that the structural imbalance between demand for talent and supply of talent may be more extreme than ever over the next several years.  It probably also means that our job will become more difficult as we will have fewer candidates for a market that will continue to grow based on demographic realities.  Our clients can count on our help, though, to make sure that they have the talent they need to provide a consistently high level of care.