Veterans Can Help American Healthcare’s Workforce Crisis​

By Patrick Cavanaugh Koroly

American healthcare is facing a workforce crisis. Labor shortages—a major difficulty in the wake of COVID-19—are projected to worsen in the coming decade: the healthcare industry is projected to add two million new jobs, largely driven by increased demand for senior care. Unanswered shortages threaten upheaval for American society as we know it.

No solutions have been found. Yet one fact is increasingly clear: to meet the growing demand for healthcare workers, America’s healthcare workforce must diversify. As crucial roles go unfilled, the underrepresentation of many demographics is glaring. Is the field doing its best to reach prospective workers? The most egregiously absent demographic is men, accounting for just 22% of healthcare workers, particularly in senior care. They account for an even smaller percentage of jobs in shortage-laden roles: though men hold 42% of healthcare jobs requiring a graduate degree, they hold just 18% with no degree requirement and 14% with a bachelor’s requirement. These jobs are growing far faster than roles with higher credential requirements. If employers can only recruit from a small segment of the population, these shortages will persist.

This does not seem like a problem that will solve itself: men declined from 37% to 23% of the healthcare workforce from 1968 to 2024, a change largely driven by an influx of women into jobs previously dominated by men. But practical action is difficult. Demographic-specific recruitment is legally and culturally fraught. Though such recruitment campaigns are not illegal, preferential hiring and admissions are unambiguously so. Institutions are afraid to toe this line, and few want to take any risks when the potential consequences are so great. Aside from legal fears, institutional culture is rarely amenable to such efforts: male-specific considerations often carry thorny political connotations and rarely mesh with existing institutional priorities. Given these obstacles, campaigns to this point have largely been limited and ineffective. In practice, they’ve done little more than change brochures and put up a few billboards. Though recruiting men remains a point of interest in the field, growth has largely stagnated.

What concrete steps could healthcare organizations take to reach men? Though direct recruitment seems untenable, one indirect strategy offers some promise: recruiting veterans. Past analyses have pointed to young male veterans as an ideal target for recruitment: given their higher-than-average unemployment and frequent lack of college education, they are poised to benefit from deliberate recruitment efforts and to offer a valuable service to a field in need of new workers. Many could quickly enter roles requiring no education; others pursuing an associate’s or bachelor’s could quickly earn the credentials needed for other roles.

The direct benefits for each side are obvious: healthcare finds new workers and young veterans find good jobs. But the indirect impact on the workforce could be immense. Young men considering “feminine”-coded jobs in healthcare—nursing, caretaking, and similar roles—face relentless peer pressure keeping them out of the field. Although healthcare will account for over half of all working-class job growth in the coming decade, young men who need these jobs are hesitant to accept them. Without male role models in the field, many young men perceive this work as demanding that they compromise on their masculinity. Effective campaigns targeting male veterans could develop the social scaffolding that men need to accept this work, first by adding male peers and second by changing the narrative of how men enter healthcare. Deliberately connecting veterans with healthcare changes this from a sacrifice of masculinity to a continuation of a traditionally masculine career arc.

Beyond this impact on young men considering the field, male veterans entering the healthcare workforce may offer another hidden benefit: building patient trust. Patients, both men and women, express a clear preference for female caretakers. In my work studying senior care, providers have estimated that as many as 90% of patients want female caretakers—many women outright refuse male caretakers. Men entering these fields face harsh stereotypes, portraying them as threats to both male and female patients. These fears discourage men from entering the field but further discourage employers from pursuing them: as men can only care for a select few patients, they are inherently limited as caretakers.

Identifying male healthcare workers with veterans, a highly trusted demographic and especially trusted by older Americans, may help to undo these stereotypes. Most Americans still associate veterans with positive stereotypes such as loyalty and discipline, while few very few consider them to be uncompassionate or unethical. Men entering nontraditional healthcare careers need a positive face. Leaning on Americans’ trust for veterans could offer it.

Recruitment efforts should not be reduced to mere advertising. The healthcare industry must find a way to make these jobs appealing and accessible. Recruitment efforts will be for nought if low pay and burnout make retention impossible, which is an issue that tends to afflict veterans in the civilian workforce at much higher rates than non-veteran workers. Beyond brochures and advisors, successful outreach must offer jobs worth taking. With healthcare’s high credential barriers, veterans may struggle to access the industry’s best jobs. Veterans currently in healthcare—especially young and female veterans—often work low-paying jobs with few requirements. Concrete recruitment efforts must offer real trajectories. Connecting prospective workers with dead-end jobs won’t offer any lasting benefit to either side; it’s a band-aid rather than a cure.

Although healthcare’s best jobs lie behind long, difficult educations and many veterans are stuck in low-skill, poor-paying jobs, practical efforts can be made to connect veterans with better career trajectories. Nursing particularly has strong career prospects and a great need for new workers—the US is projected to have a shortage of 267,000 full-time registered nurses in 2028. While many in the field are pushing to require bachelor’s degrees for new nurses, hospitals are still largely willing to hire nurses with just an associate’s degree. Existing recruitment efforts, though limited, have helped hospitals connect with veterans immediately qualified for work. A broader campaign could immediately link needy hospitals with ready workers and develop the infrastructure for further efforts to diversify the workforce.

Employers and educators could further work to develop sensible equivalencies between military medical work and civilian credentials. More than 50,000 veterans with medical training were discharged between 2006 and 2010, yet many leave to find that their military training carries no formal weight in the industry. Often, veterans entering healthcare find that they must repeat medical training they’ve already completed. This unnecessarily slows and discourages prospective entrants. Some states have created such equivalencies, particularly for veterans to serve as emergency medical technicians (EMTs), but the lack of standardization across the country often renders veterans’ training worthless in the workplace.

It is hard to project the long-term impact of these efforts on the field. These are intangible obstacles: stereotypes and self-image, things that can’t be nailed down numerically. Yet veteran-specific recruitment efforts offer a potential path to diversifying healthcare while remaining concrete. Focusing on one viable group of candidates is a path to thinking about brass-tacks issues like pay and career trajectories rather than dealing with the specter of masculine expectations.

We are far from answering healthcare’s workforce shortage, though we can’t delay the question for long. Failure to respond could soon leave the US scrambling economically and socially. Practical steps are needed to build a stronger long-term workforce, one prepared for the coming struggles of an aging America. Recruiting veterans is a compelling option for developing an answer to demographic change. It is one of the few tenable options for practical and immediate investment.

The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy or other institutions listed.