Oregon’s health care workforce is growing, but serious challenges remain, new report says

SALEM, Ore. (KTVZ) -- While Oregon continues to make progress in bolstering and diversifying its health care workforce, challenges remain and more work is needed, an Oregon Health Authority report released Tuesday concludes.

The report also offers a wide range of recommendations to better support the professionals who help Oregonians manage their health – including offering workers housing allowances or child care subsidies and establishing a centralized statewide clinical placement system for nursing students.

The 2025 Health Care Workforce Needs Assessment largely finds Oregon needs more professionals working to meet demand, particularly in rural areas. The report also determined the racial, ethnic and gender makeup of Oregon’s health care workforce doesn’t match the state’s diversity, although the degree to which there are staff shortages and insufficient diversity varies within each profession.

“Oregon needs a robust and diverse health care workforce to ensure every person in our state can access affordable health care and have an equal opportunity to achieve good health,” said OHA Health Policy & Analytics Director Clare Pierce-Wrobel. “The 2025 Health Care Workforce Needs Assessment illustrates how Oregon’s current efforts to improve its health care workforce are making an impact while also identifying challenges and making recommendations to address gaps.”

Required by a 2017 state law, the comprehensive biennial assessment includes data from the state’s health professional licensing boards, the Oregon Employment Department and numerous other organizations’ reports and surveys. The report helps inform policies and investments related to Oregon’s health care workforce.

OHA partnered with Oregon State University to compile the 2025 assessment, which focuses on the health care workforce through 10 health fields: nursing, behavioral health, primary care, oral health, public health, long-term care, traditional health, health care interpretation, gender-affirming care and school health, with the last two being new additions to this year’s report.

The 2025 assessment describes the many complex challenges faced by the state’s more than 209,000 licensed health care providers, including:

• While Oregon’s health care and social assistance sector increased by more than 15,000 jobs during the past year, it had even more vacancies – 18,800 empty positions – at the same time.
• The health care sector relies on a highly educated and skilled workforce, with over 70% of the difficult-to-fill health care job vacancies in 2023 requiring education beyond high school.
• Workforce shortages are exacerbated by the high levels of stress that often accompany jobs in this sector.
• Burnout remains an issue despite decreasing from its pandemic peak.
• Health care workers are unevenly distributed, with rural and underserved communities generally having fewer providers than resource-rich urban areas.
• Female providers are overrepresented in most health care professions, while men tend to be overrepresented in fields such as medicine and dentistry that require more formal training.
• A lower percentage of Latino, Black and American Indian/Alaska Native Oregonians work in health care overall, although people of color are more likely to work in lower-paid health care positions.
• Barriers to educational opportunities as well as affordable housing, childcare and transportation prevent many from joining the workforce or advancing their health care careers.

Key findings about some of the health care professions featured in the report include:

• Nursing: The state’s overall nursing workforce has grown by an average of 15.5% since 2020. However, just 74.7% of the state’s licensed registered nurses were practicing in 2023. Filling vacancies is challenging because the state’s education programs currently only produce enough graduates to fill about 72% of annual demand for new nurses, meaning Oregon must import nurses. Future nurses are poised to shift the field’s demographics, as the state’s nursing students are more diverse than today’s workforce.
• Behavioral health: The statewide full-time equivalent of behavioral health providers per 1,000 people increased from 1.15 in 2023 to 1.25 in 2024. As of May 2024, Oregon was home to more than 16,000 licensed behavioral health providers such as alcohol and drug counselors and mental health associates. Even so, a 2024 national mental health report ranked Oregon 47th, indicating the state has higher mental illness and reduced access to mental health care. To address this, the Oregon Legislature has invested more than $1.35 billion since 2021 to support behavioral health workers. Behavioral health care is becoming more accessible as it is integrated into primary care services provided at 62% of Oregon’s more than 600 Patient-Centered Primary Care Homes, which OHA recognizes for providing high-quality, person-focused and comprehensive care.
• Primary care: Demand for primary care providers – including physicians, nurse practitioners, physician associates and naturopathic physicians – outpaces supply given population growth and an aging society. The distribution of Oregon’s estimated 9,584 total primary care providers was uneven in 2024, with rural and remote areas having fewer providers to meet demand. The state also has a smaller portion of primary care medical residents, or new physicians who are training in primary care, than the nationwide average.
• Oral health: Oregon offers extensive dental benefits to adults and children on Medicaid and allows one of the broadest scopes of practice for dental hygienists, who can prescribe and dispense topical medications and more here. While the rate of actively practicing oral health providers in Oregon has remained steady since 2016, about 1 million Oregonians live in a Dental Health Professional Shortage Area and more than half of Oregon dentists don’t accept Medicaid. Several OHA projects aim to improve oral health care access, including helping establish a new dental clinic in Brookings that will serve Medicaid patients, introducing loan repayment for dental therapists and dental assistants, and supporting dental therapy pilot projects as well as virtual learning sessions to help oral health providers train dental students.

The report recommends numerous steps to help Oregon grow and diversify its health care workforce, including:

• Increase training opportunities – especially in rural and underserved areas – and create more pre-college learning pathways for younger students. Increase investment in Oregon’s public and private higher education system to scale up health education programs.
• Create a centralized statewide clinical placement system for nursing students to reduce competition between Oregon’s nursing education programs and hospitals.
• Increase compensation and other benefits, including offering stipends for housing, childcare, transportation and other barriers to working in health care.
• Reduce administrative burdens that make hiring staff and billing for care challenging.
• Expand the Oregon Wellness Program, which promotes health care professional well-being by providing free counseling and more, to include culturally responsive support, prevention, acute intervention and chronic management for all health care workers.
• Streamline and expedite certification and licensing, including entering licensing reciprocity agreements that could make it easier for health professionals who are licensed in other states to practice in Oregon.
• Continue the OHA Health Care Provider Incentive Program, which provides loan repayment and more to attract and keep workers in rural and underserved communities. Supported by $25.2 million in state funding during the current 2023-2025 biennium, the program, combined with other state-funded programs, has provided incentives to 7,735 health care workers since 2018.

More detailed information is available in the 154-page 2025 Health Care Workforce Needs Assessment.

Later this year, OHA will also issue a related report to specifically evaluate the impact of state-funded health care workforce incentives.