Health care staffing shortages and potential national hospital bed shortage (19 February 2025)

Summary

Between August 2020 and April 2024, US hospitals were mandated to report weekly occupancy to the Department of Health and Human Services as part of Covid-19 data tracking efforts, providing unprecedented insight into mean daily census and inpatient bed supply across nearly all hospitals nationwide. In this report, the authors repurposed this Covid-19 dashboard to describe several possible US hospital bed occupancy scenarios arising from an aging US population over the next decade, while varying hospitalisation rates and staffed hospital bed supply.

Content

The study found that the US has achieved a new postpandemic hospital occupancy steady state 11 percentage points higher than it was prepandemic. This persistently elevated occupancy appears to be driven by a 16% reduction in the number of staffed US hospital beds rather than by a change in the number of hospitalisations.

Experts in developed countries have posited that a national hospital occupancy of 85% constitutes a hospital bed shortage (a conservative estimate); these findings show that the US could reach this dangerous threshold as soon as 2032, with some states at much higher risk than others. These scenarios suggest that an increase in the staffed hospital bed supply by 10%, reduction in the hospitalisation rate by 10%, or some combination of the two would offset the aging-associated increase in hospitalizations over the next decade.