Sumo Medial Staffing

The youngest Boomers turned 60 in 2023. The oldest will turn 78 this year. It stands to reason, that your Boomer healthcare staff already has started retiring and will continue to do so for the next several years. 

Yet there’s already a physician staffing shortage. In fact, physicians are starting to retire at earlier ages due to burnout (instead of retiring because they’ve reached retirement age)  

Healthcare providers, understandably, aren’t too “keen” on this. 

And, of course, it’s not just doctors who are leaving the field “early”: NPs, PAs, PTs, licensed clinical social workers, and many other healthcare pros also are leaving due to retirement and burnout.  

There is a solution: bringing in locum physicians as well as locum allied healthcare professionals

It’s not that healthcare pros suddenly have decided they hate their work.  

It’s burnout, mostly.

Yet, we’ve found that many of these important professionals don’t necessarily leave healthcare entirely. 

They start to work locum tenens

Doing this helps them avoid burnout: they can work a locum assignment for a few weeks or months and then take a few weeks or even a few months off before they go on another locum gig. 

More and more healthcare pros are starting to work as locums. Many of them, in fact, are doing so full-time: more physicians were working full-time as locums in 2023 (43 percent) than were doing so in 2019 (30 percent). 

Hiring locum tenens healthcare pros can be a terrific win for both the pros themselves as well as medical facilities: 

Healthcare facilities get great people while the locums themselves work when they want, for however long they want, avoiding burnout. 

Yes, as a locum tenens provider ourselves, one could probably say that we’re biased about what a great thing this is. 

But isn’t it better to have talented temporary healthcare professionals working for you – and happily so – when the alternative is overworked, burned-out full-time professionals who decide to retire early or quit completely?   

The shortage of healthcare professionals hasn’t been labeled “critical.” At least not officially. 

But as your patient population ages alongside your healthcare staff (with the usual increased need for healthcare services as a result), and with fewer people available to even work in the profession due to the current “baby bust,” the need for healthcare professionals is going to grow while the supply shrinks. 

Locum tenens professionals may be the answer. 

Learn more about SUMO Staffing’s locum tenens services.