Many people may be aware by now that the United States is battling a shortage of nurses and physicians, but what’s received significantly less attention is that numerous other health care occupations — from home health aides to medical laboratory technicians to physical therapists — also are facing a short supply of workers.

“People think health care, they think doctor, nurse — one or the other,” says Brightpoint Community College President William C. Fiege. “But we also need phlebotomists, we need clinical medical assistants. … There are so many different aspects to health care.”

According to estimates from the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis, by 2037, the country could be short:

• 79,160 psychologists
• 36,820 dispensing opticians
• 29,740 dental hygienists
• 17,030 pharmacists

Don’t expect Virginia to prove the exception to the rule.

The George Mason University Center for Health Workforce, founded in 2022 to address the critical shortage of health workers in Virginia, offers these numbers:

• Dental assistants — Current need: 9,330. Projected need over next 10 years: 13,475
• Pharmacy technicians — Current need: 6,410. Projected need over next 10 years: 7,800
• Medical and clinical laboratory technologists — Current need: 4,785. Projected need over next 10 years: 5,960
• Respiratory therapists — Current need: 2,225. Projected need over next 10 years: 3,150

What’s driving the deficit is complicated.

Baby boomers can take part of the blame. In 2020, 55.8 million Americans were ages 65 and over, according to the U.S. Census. By 2030, when all baby boomers will be at least 65, seniors are expected to make up 20% of the U.S. population.

Birth rates decreased from 1965 through the early 1970s then “fluctuated little in succeeding decades,” according to public policy nonprofit The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Put simply: There are too few people to care for too many seniors.

“It’s a demographic convergence,” explains Cynthia Lawrence, director of Carilion Clinic‘s workforce development office and president of the Blue Ridge Partnership for Health Science Careers.

COVID can be thanked for making a bad situation worse. Medical workers burned out caring for so many terribly ill patients during the pandemic. Some health care professionals retired early; some switched to other fields. Some died from the coronavirus. By the end of 2022, a total of 145,213 health care providers had left the profession, according to Definitive Healthcare, a Massachusetts health care data firm.

It doesn’t help matters that too few students are now choosing health care careers. Even with the current, insufficient number of students, however, there aren’t enough training programs for some health occupations. It’s often difficult for schools to increase capacity of programs or to launch new programs because there aren’t enough health care workers who have both the required advanced degrees and a desire to teach.

There’s no overnight fix to this crisis. But there is good news: Many health systems, nonprofits and higher education institutions across Virginia are hard at work trying to fix the problem.

For example, HCA Virginia Health System, which operates 14 hospitals in the commonwealth, partnered with Brightpoint Community College this year to address the state’s shortage of radiologic technicians, who take X-rays and CAT scans.

The division of Tennessee-based HCA Healthcare has invested $2.97 million to develop a radiologic technology degree program on the campus of Chippenham Hospital in Richmond.

“It started with a conversation about a hospital having a strong need for radiologic technicians, and a college that said, ‘Hey, we’re happy to help,’” explains Fiege, Brightpoint’s president.

HCA Virginia’s investment included money to renovate a former doctor’s office into a 3,000-square-foot space on the hospital’s campus into a learning space for students. The health system also budgeted $625,000 to offer 10 scholarships each year.

The program’s first cohort, which has 20 students, launched in August 2024. David Scotto, 27, of Amelia County, was one of the inaugural students. He didn’t need the HCA scholarship because his tuition was already covered by other state and federal grants, including G3, a tuition assistance program for Virginia residents studying for in-demand careers. “I go to school for free,” says Scotto, who juggles his classes with working as a physical therapy technician for Bon Secours health system.

Scotto settled on becoming a radiologic technician because he wanted to combine his love of technology with the feeling he gets from seeing someone who is sick getting better.

He’s also happy to have picked a field where he likely won’t have to hunt for work. There were over 3,400 job openings in Virginia for imaging technologists in September 2024, according to the Mason Center for Health Workforce.

“These students will probably all have jobs two semesters before they graduate,” says Stacey Shell, radiologic technology program director at Brightpoint.

Apprenticeships and scholarships

Hampton Roads health system Sentara Health partnered with Tidewater Community College to launch an apprentice program for respiratory therapists in 2024.

Respiratory therapy programs have seen a 27% decrease in student enrollment since 2010, according to a 2023 study in the journal Respiratory Care. Sentara reports only 89 respiratory therapist students graduated in Virginia in 2022.

TCC accepted about two dozen students to its program that started in August 2024, according to Tara Almony, respiratory therapy manager at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital. Of those, 13 students applied for three apprenticeships offered by

Sentara, which pays for a student’s tuition as well as expenses like books, lab fees and scrubs.

Apprentices also get to earn while they learn as full-time employees at Sentara, receiving a paycheck, paid time off and benefits. That doesn’t mean working 40 hours on top of going to school, either. Apprentices spend eight hours a week working at Norfolk General, Almony says.

For Kyle Mucciarone, the apprenticeship has allowed him to focus fully on his studies instead of having to take a part-time job. And on top of the financial support, he feels grateful for the opportunity to shadow respiratory therapists at Norfolk General — particularly on the night shift.

“Three of the four gunshot wounds that I’ve seen were at night,” he says. “It’s a rush for that first 10 minutes of running down to get to the ER and then hearing, ‘We’ve got them stabilized. We’ve got a pulse.’”

The goal of the program is to have apprentices continue their careers with Sentara after graduation. Mucciarone plans on staying at Norfolk General, Hampton Roads’ only Level I trauma center. “I wouldn’t pick any other area besides Norfolk if I was given the choice of which places I wanted to work at,” he says.

Among other initiatives to strengthen the health care workforce, Sentara announced in 2023 an investment of $4 million for two pipeline development programs.

More than $775,000 went to Project Choice, an initiative through which the health system provides students with exposure to clinical and nonclinical health care careers. The rest of the funding went to Sentara Scholars, which provides financial support to students attending programs that lead to health care careers.

As a student at Churchland High School in Portsmouth, Jaden Smith planned to attend Howard University in Washington, D.C., but naysayers told him he should choose somewhere less expensive. But “I just knew there was a scholarship out there for me,” he says.

Not long after starting at Howard in 2022, Smith won a $15,000 scholarship from Sentara Scholars. Since he’d earned college credits during high school through a dual enrollment program, Smith graduated in May 2024 with a degree in biology. Currently working as a medical assistant for Sentara, Smith plans to apply to medical school this year.

The fact that Sentara’s leaders believed in him enough to fund his education helps Smith stay focused on his goals: “Just knowing that people actually want to invest in my potential and my future keeps me going.”

A regional model

In 2018, Del. Terry L. Austin, R-Botetourt County, traveled to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston for bladder reconstruction surgery as part of a regimen to treat his bladder cancer. While chatting with workers there, Austin learned many had attended the DeBakey High School for Health Professions, a Houston public high school designed to prepare students for medical careers through a partnership with Baylor College of Medicine.

Later that year, Austin ran into Lawrence with Carilion Clinic and told her about DeBakey High. “I said, ‘We can do that,’” she recalls.

After speaking with educators in Texas about the program, Lawrence organized a sit-down with area education, health and workforce leaders to discuss the need for health care workers. As they talked, Lawrence says, it became clear that boosting the number of students going into health careers wasn’t something any one organization could tackle on its own. They had to work together.

The Blue Ridge Partnership for Health Science Careers officially formed in 2019. Today, it’s a coalition of leaders from education, industry, economic and workforce development and nonprofits working to “solidify the Roanoke and New River Valleys, the Alleghany Highlands and the greater Lynchburg region as a health sciences leader.”

The partnership’s successes include launching a student ambassador program with participants ranging from high schoolers to postgrads who are planning to go into health care. As ambassadors, their duties include speaking on workforce panels and chatting with peers about what courses to take. And in 2024, working jointly with the Virginia Department of Education and Radford University, the partnership revived the Governor’s Summer Camp for Medicine and Health, a program for high school juniors and seniors interested in health care careers. Previously staged at Virginia Commonwealth University, the four-week program hadn’t been held since 2020.

For 2024-25, the partnership is prioritizing a range of initiatives, including: expanding work-based learning experiences, like paid internships and apprenticeships; increasing the number of qualified instructors for needed health care occupations; implementing a shared instructor model between employers and schools; and increasing the number of community mentors encouraging students to consider health care careers. Today, the Blue Ridge Partnership for Health Science Careers receives funding from nonprofit Claude Moore Opportunities and serves as a regional model for the rest of the state.

Launched in 2024, Claude Moore Opportunities is a spinoff nonprofit of the Claude Moore Charitable Foundation. Created in 1987 by the late Dr. Claude Moore, a wealthy radiologist and Loudoun County landowner, the foundation’s mission includes expanding health care career development efforts across Virginia.

Over the years, CMCF has invested more than $20 million in initiatives to “provide entry points and advancement” in health care careers, including investing more than $1 million since 2021 to strengthen and expand health sciences courses in 18 K-12 districts in the Roanoke and New River valleys and the Lynchburg region.

In 2023, CMCF established a goal of “formalizing a statewide health workforce development model,” based on the Blue Ridge Partnership for Health Science Careers.

The Blue Ridge Partnership’s framework simply works, says Dr. William A. Hazel, CEO of Claude Moore Opportunities and a former state secretary of health and human resources. “We have to have some concepts about working together and aligning, so that when we try to address the barriers that are created, we can do it in an organized and intelligent fashion,” he says.

Claude Moore Opportunities furthers CMCF’s mission by addressing Virginia’s shortage of health care workers. The nonprofit’s website offers a detailed plan to help leaders in other regions of the state who want to work collaboratively to increase the health care workforce.

Hazel stresses that building the state’s health care labor supply will take collective efforts — and that means competing health systems must work together. “We need them to put aside their sort of parochial, competitive interest,” he says, “and just grow the workforce together.”

Directory of medical schools in Virginia