A new jobs report from the U.S. Department of Labor is showing a trend of jobs lost in the health care industry, with 524,000 people already listed as having left since the start of the pandemic in February of last year.

What You Need To Know

  •  A new jobs report from the U.S. Department of Labor is showing a downward trend of jobs in the health care industry

  •  According to the latest report, 524,000 people have left the field since February of 2020

  • Nursing and residential care facilities account for nearly four fifths of the loss

Over the last year and a half hospital systems have seen it all: shortages of supplies, not enough beds, long hours, and morgues being filled beyond capacity due to the coronavirus.

If that wasn’t too much for some, a vaccine mandate was their breaking point.

Nurse Practitioner Lindsey Grych will be the first to tell you she loves working with patients. 

For just under a year, Grych worked at Bartow Hospital as an advanced patient care leader. It's a job where she would put in the best practices for nurses on how to educate their patients with their current conditions. 

She is now one of the 8,000 hospital workers to leave the hospital system since February 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“Going through a huge pandemic without proper PPE, and then going from a place of maybe take an extra patient to your constantly taking an extra patient cause of the staffing shortage was a lot,” said Grych, who now works in a private practice. 

Since the pandemic began, she said her and many of her colleagues have put up with more than most.

“My husband and I both work in health care," the mother of three said. "We spent two months away from our children when this pandemic broke.”

In September, Bartow Hospital required workers get vaccinated, and that was where Grych decided to draw the line.

“I started looking for employment elsewhere," she said. "Just because I wanted to be able to have a choice and be able to watch the science.”

Employment in health care is down over half a million jobs in the past 20 months — nursing and residential care facilities account for nearly four fifths of the loss.

“Watching patients essentially struggle from COVID that long, sometimes 30 to 45 days was just so heartbreaking," Grych said.

And it’s a trend she feels will only continue, with heartache and people looking for work elsewhere.​

Since February of last year residential health care facilities are down 38,000