Ensuring and sustaining a pandemic workforce

Current efforts to fight the Covid-19 pandemic aim to slow viral spread and increase testing, protect health care workers from infection, and obtain ventilators and other equipment to prepare for a surge of critically ill patients. But additional actions are needed to rapidly increase health workforce capacity and to replenish it when personnel are quarantined or need time off to rest or care for sick family members. It seems clear that health care delivery organizations, educators, and government leaders will all have to be willing to cut through bureaucratic barriers and adapt regulations to rapidly expand the U.S. health care workforce and sustain it for the duration of the pandemic

Do Wages Matter?: A Backward Bend in the 2004 California RN Labor Supply

Using data from the 2004 California Board of Registered Nursing Survey, a two-stage least-square equation was estimated to examine the effect of wages on hours worked by female registered nurses. Wages were found to have a nonlinear effect on hours worked, with a backward bending supply curve. Wages had a positive effect on the average hours worked per week up to $24.99 per hour and a negative effect between$30.00 and $100.00 per hour when compared with the wage category of$25.00 to $29.99. Results suggest that wages are important to secure the labor supply but do not increase aggregate supply beyond a wage threshold