About Us

The Georgia Higher Education Healthcare Initiative was created in December 2023 to address healthcare workforce shortages.

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The healthcare workforce shortage was a long time in the making and there have been numerous studies by various panels, including state, federal, nonprofit, and institutions.  The data all point to the same results: a national RN shortage and an MD shortage.  In state comparisons, Georgia ranks in the lowest 4/5ths regarding these healthcare professionals per capita.   This is not to say that the state has taken little to no action to solve its nursing and physician shortages.  Georgia’s medical schools (both private and public) have been growing numbers of graduates for decades.  The 26 USG nursing schools have also grown class sizes as have private colleges and for-profit nursing schools.   

 

All these efforts have not been adequate in magnitude and scope.  Institutions grew class sizes for RN education, but not enough to keep up with demand, burnout, attrition, and a retiring workforce. Medical schools grew the Undergraduate Medical Education (UME) output of MDs but not enough to address demand, retirements, and burnout.  Growing UME alone is inadequate to address the physician shortage in Georgia: we must also simultaneously address the Graduate Medical Education (GME) component.  More than 68% of medical school graduates leave the state for their residencies (according to the 2024 Georgia Board of Health Care Workforce 2024 Composite Match Report). 

 

The GAHEHI aims to generate ideas and action plans to significantly improve Georgia’s standing and the number of RNs and MDs who practice in the state. We will accomplish this by offering a path for collaboration to improve the state’s healthcare workforce.  We will outline a set of feasible, meaningful collaborative action steps across healthcare, academia, and communities to strengthen our state’s capacity to help Georgians get and stay healthy.  The time is now to expand the state’s healthcare workforce education and retention capabilities. 

 

Our focus will be on two specific areas of short-term action:  (1) strengthening the pipelines into medical and nursing schools and (2) addressing retention in both the state and profession.  Our goal is measurable progress toward improving Georgia’s ranking in active RNs and MDs per capita within the next 18 months and providing a foundation for further improvement.